Mother's Day

by Dennis McDougal

  But for reasons that none of her children ever understood, Theresa decided to end it with Ollie. It came to a vicious climax one night when a shrieking Theresa busted a telephone against his head. He escaped from the front room with his hand covering a gap in his skull, leaving behind a trail of blood that the kids had to clean up the next morning. Their mother offered no explanations as to what provoked her attack.

  Still, Ollie came back. Ultimately, Theresa pulled the same trick on him that she later played on tenacious bill collectors who went beyond her post office box and located where she lived: she acted as if no one was at home and refused to answer the door.

  “We never answered the door,” said Terry. “Even if it was somebody you knew, you did not answer the door unless my mom said it was all right. Usually we just sat quiet in the front room, barely breathing until whoever it was got tired of ringing the bell and left.”

  Despite the cloak of brooding anger that constantly enveloped the house at 5539 Bellingham Way, the 1970s were generally a good time for the three boys and three girls that Theresa Pulliam raised, as a single parent, in the suburbs of Sacramento. It was a good time for Theresa, too. The house might not be the Ritz, and living one step above welfare on minimum wage might not foster a royal lifestyle, but owning her own home and eking out an existence for herself and her children represented at least some version of the American Dream to a single mother who’d grown up dirt-poor and undereducated in Rio Linda.

  Then Theresa met Chet Harris, and everything changed.

  VIII

  Like George Burns and Ted Kennedy, newspaperman Chet Harris was living, breathing testimony to the fact that abusing one’s body did not necessarily guarantee a quick trip to the grave. He was nearly sixty before he became the fourth and final husband of Theresa Jimmie Cross. He seemed to be in wheezing poor health even then, but he went on to live another thirteen years.

  Harris was fifty-two when he arrived in Sacramento, having spent most of his early career in the East as a hard-drinking, heavy-smoking cityside reporter for newspapers in Pittsburgh, Long Island, and St. Louis. Pictures taken during his salad days showed the steely eyes and granite profile of a tough young newsman. He wore a snap-brim hat in the Walter Winchell style, delighted in flashing his “press” card when the cops tried barring him from the scene of an accident, and would simply never take “no comment” as any kind of an answer.

  But his reporting days had long ended by the time he got to California. He couldn’t grab a pad and pencil and run off to press conferences the way he once did. In fact, he couldn’t run anywhere. At more than three hundred pounds, he was barely able to scale the three flights of stairs and squeeze into a swivel chair at the copy desk of the Sacramento Union each day, where he rewrote other reporters’ stories, scribbled captions for photos, and dashed off headlines for the next day’s editions.

  It had not always been so. Chet Harris had been a real journalist once. He’d written three books and worked on more than a half-dozen newspapers before emigrating to California. He began as a cub on the sports desk of the McKeesport Daily in 1936, when he was still in his teens. For the next twenty years Chet Harris was a firebrand with a First Amendment missionary’s zeal.

  He didn’t write stories to please or inform the public. He wrote stories to put miscreants in jail. He was married and had a family, but the newsroom at the Sun Telegraph in Pittsburgh, where he spent twenty years, became his real home. The editors, reporters, and photographers who gathered there each morning to put out another edition became more of a family to him than his own wife and children. Harris and his colleagues ended each day with a round of drinks at the bar across the street. Sometimes he didn’t get home until way after midnight, stinking of beer. If his wife raised the question of his priorities, family or job, the newspaper invariably won out.

  The 1940s and 1950s were Harris’s glory days. By the time the rival Pittsburgh Post Gazette bought his beloved Sun Telegraph from Hearst Newspapers, just so the new owners could close it down forever, Chet Harris’s career as a crusading investigative reporter had wound to a close.

  In 1960, the Sun Telegraph had merged with the Post Gazette and Harris found himself out of a job. His wife had divorced him and left the state with their two daughters. And Harris wasn’t getting any younger. He had gained a lot of weight, developed a hacking smoker’s cough, and increased his alcohol intake to several six-packs a day. But Chet Harris was a stubborn man. It would be years before he came to fully comprehend that drinking could ruin just about everything in a man’s life except his dedication to the written word.

  He moved on from Pittsburgh to New York and then St. Louis, and to a job as a copy editor at the Globe-Democrat, all the while putting away more beer on a daily basis than a hundred Homer Simpsons. In St. Louis, he remarried. He and his new wife, a nurse named Dona Davis Harris, lived modestly but happily for a few years in the suburbs. Inevitably, booze and bad habits bested that marriage, too.

  By 1970, the very heavy, very alcoholic, and very grizzled Chester L. Harris left Dona Davis and St. Louis, and set out for yet another new life—this time on the West Coast. Just before Christmas, he showed up as sober as he could manage at the Sacramento Union, looking for a job.

  “He was one of the last of the itinerent newspaper editors,” said Michael Fallon, who worked with Harris at the Union. In the 1990s, Harris would never have been able to pull up stakes, get in his car, and drive to another town with any kind of assurance that he would find a job waiting for him there. But in the 1970s, when newspapers were still formidable and flush with advertising money, a skilled copy editor could walk into almost any newspaper office in the land and go to work.

  Robert Carney, Harris’s old boss at the Globe-Democrat, had hired on at the Union as news editor a few years before Harris showed up in California. He put Chet to work immediately on the copy desk.

  The Union was the home of K. W. Lee, a brilliant but incendiary investigative reporter likened by his coworkers to a “crazy Korean kamikaze,” who nonetheless wrote the kinds of stories that sent corrupt officials to jail and got wrongly convicted felons released from prison; Wayne Kent, who covered lurid murder trials and delighted in detailing for the young and impressionable women in the office precisely what the killers did to the corpses; Steve Spence, a practical joker and ladies’ man who ran the city desk like a check-in counter at a mental-health clinic. In his baggy pants, clownish suspenders, slue-footed shuffle, and potbelly to rival that of Santa Claus, Chet Harris fit right in—drunk or sober.

  “Newspaper people are a different breed of people from other grown-ups,” explained Patty Williams, a former receptionist for the newspaper. “Chet did not appear to be a drunk, although we all drank a lot at the Union in those days. Looking back, I don’t know if the pot would know whether the kettle drank or not. We all had our peculiarities.”

  One of Chet’s peculiarities was an unswerving dedication to the men and women of American Legion Post No. 521 of Rio Linda, where Chet’s stool at the end of the bar was as sacrosanct as that of the TV character Norm in the sitcom Cheers.

  “I think of his social life as beginning and ending at the American Legion hall at Rio Linda,” said Michael Fallon. “He was really quite a private person as far as the paper was concerned. He was a bit older and kept pretty much to himself. He just sort of did his job and then loped off to Rio Linda each day.”

  At the American Legion, Harris had his loyal following of conservative fellow-World War II vets who groused about draft dodgers and dopers who’d come back from Vietnam only to become losers, living off the public dole. One of the Vietnam vets who resented the talk about World War II being “the Good War” and the harsh words heaped on those who got strung out on drugs in Vietnam was Bob Knorr. He belonged to the same American Legion post as Harris, had been struggling for years with his own drug problems, and didn’t appreciate the rank old copy editor’s self-righteous attitude. Of the dozen or so aging, alcoholic vets wh
o gathered at the end of each day at the American Legion bar to complain about the younger generation, Knorr found Chet Harris to be particularly offensive.

  Chet Harris no longer wore his Walter Winchell snap-brim hat. He had become grouchy, obese, and smelled of pilsner and body odor. When he rolled in from the Union at the end of each day, he expected not one, but two, bottles of Coors to be waiting for him at the end of the bar. He once explained to a fellow customer that he always wanted to be sure he had a cold one waiting for him and the only way to be sure of that was by ordering two at once.

  Beer was not his only addiction. He also liked women—or, at least, sex.

  “He was married five or six times, which is amazing in itself because I can’t imagine five or six women in this world who would want to marry him,” recalled Patty Williams. “He was pretty gross.”

  Gross, perhaps, but a lothario nonetheless.

  “He had several wives,” said his sister, Mrs. Janet Gentilini. “He went from one wife to another. I don’t know whether it was five or six times. His first wife died on their first wedding anniversary. He was married to his second wife—the one who moved to upstate New York—for at least eighteen or twenty years. And he married the next one, Dona Davis, just about a year later. The marriage to Dona might’ve been another five or six years.

  “And then, after that, it just seemed like it was bing, bing, bing! It was one right after the other. I lost track of them after about the first three. In fact, I don’t believe I ever met any after the first three.”

  After Dona, whom he often described as the one true love of his life, Harris married again and again … but didn’t remain married long.

  On January 8, 1973, he married Roxie Chaffin, a petite housewife eleven years younger than he.

  “It seems to me that in some people’s eyes, she was attractive,” said Patty Williams. “They used to fight a lot, though.”

  “She was a very presentable woman and a very gracious hostess,” recalled Robert Carney. “They seemed very much in love when they were first together, but I guess it soured.”

  And soured quickly. On February 4, Mrs. Roxie Harris filed for divorce and had the papers served at Chet’s third-floor office in the Union building. She waived alimony and asked only that the name Roxie Chaffin be restored. Because the marriage wasn’t even a month old, Roxie didn’t get a formal divorce. The court granted her an annulment. None of Chet’s close associates ever knew exactly why Roxie left him, but Chet made it clear just how badly he took it.

  “Chet really hated that breakup,” recalled Carney. “He used to be quite upset because she was living away from him. He wanted to have her back.”

  In the meantime Harris moved into his dream home. He painted the walls of the interior white and the baseboard and trim red. His collies had the run of the house. When he was married, he had people from the paper out to visit and threw barbecues in the backyard on occasion. But after Roxie left him, he became a hermit, with only his three dogs to keep him company. Alone with his dogs and his beer, he grew larger and lonelier with each passing year.

  “After he left St. Louis and he drove out west, I guess he was just a very lonely man,” said his sister, Janet. “He’d made such a mess of his life. I guess he figured he’d go out there and start anew. His drinking and carousing got him in trouble, and anyone he happened to meet who maybe had a little sympathy toward his problems, or was easy to talk to, he latched onto. He just liked to have company. He didn’t like to be alone.”

  When he met Theresa Pulliam at the bar of the American Legion hall in the summer of 1976, Chet was twice her age and twice her size. He smoked two packs of filterless Pall Malls each day, and lived on a diet of draft beer, cold cuts, and cholesterol-laden groceries. Theresa had begun to thicken around the middle herself, but she was still a toothpick by her future husband’s standards.

  “By then, Chet Harris had to weigh maybe 375, 400 pounds,” said Bob Knorr. “He was a big man. Over six foot. Had a big nose and lost most of his hair. Really a pretty awful sight to have to look at.

  “She met him in the American Legion hall one night. About three days later they decided they’re gonna get married. I caught hell from my buddies. ‘That’s your ex-wife married to Chet Harris?’ She was still kind of thin then. Just about that time was when she started putting the weight on.”

  Theresa and Chet were married August 23, 1976, in Sacramento. He was the fifty-nine-year-old Special Sections editor of the Union, earning a salary of $1,600 a month, and she was a thirty-year-old sometimes Watkins Products saleswoman from Orangevale—a mother of six children, ranging in age from seven to thirteen. Her monthly income: $1,000.

  “My mother married him for the same reason she ever went out with any guy I ever knew: for the money,” said Terry. “She got him, and she got him good.”

  With her children, Theresa made no pretense about what she was doing and why. “Even before she got married we were all informed that it was a big sacrifice for her because she wanted Suesan to get an education,” said Robert. “Since Chester had political connections with the board of education through the Union, Suesan would have a better opportunity to get a first-rate education along with all the rest of the kids,” Robert recalled his mother saying.

  Theresa moved swiftly. Before the ceremony, she put the house on Bellingham Way up for sale and moved herself and all six of her children into Chet’s place on Eighth Street in Rio Linda. Once she and her brood were in residence, she declared that the house was too small for eight people and three dogs. She informed her new husband that they needed more room.

  “She married Chet Harris, and right away she got him to put a big addition onto his house,” said Bob Knorr. “He had to go out and take a second mortgage out on the house to make it big enough to satisfy her.”

  On September 16, 1976, less than three weeks after exchanging wedding vows, Chet and Theresa obtained a second trust deed loan of $7,000 from Investors Yield of Sacramento. Before he could use a dime of it to build the addition that Theresa demanded, Theresa used five hundred dollars to pay off a three-year-old court judgment against her. She explained to her new husband that she had purchased some appliances on credit back in 1973, after she left Ron Pulliam, and then found that she couldn’t pay for them. By paying them off, she and Chet would start out with a clean slate.

  The money situation was not going to be a one-way street, however, she assured him. With the equity she had built up in the Bellingham Way house, they would be able to pool their money and turn the Eighth Street house into a veritable Taj Mahal.

  But the Taj Mahal was never to be. Within weeks of their wedding Theresa discovered that Chet Harris had a horrid little secret, and Theresa’s own double standard in ethical behavior went into overdrive. His hobby was photography, and he had photos on the wall of all of his ex-wives. He had other portraits of them, too, which he did not openly display.

  “He had a portrait done of Roxanne that was nude,” said Robert. “It was a picture of her with her hands kind of triangled between her legs, outlining her crotch, and the crotch was thrust forward. I remember that vividly because I opened a closet one day and there it was.”

  Chester wanted Theresa to pose for him, too. According to Terry, he wanted her mother to do it in the nude. Theresa refused.

  “He liked pornography,” said Terry. “He had naked pictures of Roxie, the woman he was married to before, and when my mother saw them, she went nuts. I mean, she did all kinds of shit with men, but when it came to other people and their sexual kinky stuff, she went off like a firecracker.”

  Theresa wore muumuus around the house and nothing else. She had to remain naked for Chester, she explained to her daughters. It was all part of her sacrifice for her children.

  Most of Theresa’s children had no sympathy for Harris. He wasn’t abusive and did not appear to get fresh with Theresa’s girls at first, but his sheer size and girth combined with years of foul bachelor habits made all the children sh
udder each time he walked through the front door.

  But Theresa was willing to overlook all his faults in furtherance of her grand plan. Besides using him to pay her bills and build a larger, newer house for herself and her children, she saw Chet Harris as a tool to torture and lure Bob Knorr back into her clutches.

  “My mom was trying to hook up with my dad again at this time, while she was still married to Chet and he was still married to Georgia,” said Terry. “She was making eyeballs at my real dad, Robert Knorr, who lived in Rio Linda then and used to go drink at the American Legion a lot.

  “My mom never got over my dad. All our life she had his marine pictures around, and she wouldn’t let any of us kids mess with them. She kept them in one box in the cupboard with anything that meant anything to her: dolls, pictures, an old camera, an old Burger-meister beer mug from my grandpa, her geneology book about the Cross family.…”

  The story Theresa told her children about how she met Chester put the blame squarely on Bob’s shoulders. He was the one who introduced them at the American Legion hall, and he was the one who knew—or should have known—that Chet Harris was evil.

  On Halloween, the boys saw—or thought they saw—the real Chester Harris. It was Chester’s favorite holiday.

  “He called it Hobo Days rather than Halloween,” said Robert. “He came out wearing a devil’s mask that looked a little too natural on him. And I remember I slid back on all fours about two or three feet and stopped when I realized that the asshole was wearing a mask. My brother William ran out of the house and was in the backyard the second he saw him.”