In My Father's House

by Fox Butterfield

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  After Charlie and Dude were gone, Louis and Elvie left Paris for Amarillo. They were convinced by word from Charlie that there was work to be had on the construction of the new Amarillo Army Air Field. By now Elvie and Louis had three more children: a boy, improbably named Elvie, after his mother, but always called Babe; a daughter, Peggy; and the youngest, Dale Vincent Bogle, who was known in the family as Rooster. He was born in Wichita Falls in 1941 during a stopover his parents made on their way to Amarillo. The family may have been poor—in their last days in Paris and then during their sojourn in Wichita Falls and the beginning of their time in Amarillo they all lived in one big tent—but they had a strong sense of family loyalty, like a clan. Much as they may have looked dysfunctional to others, the Bogles held what amounted to mandatory family meetings every morning, wherever they lived. The family was like church for Louis and Elvie and their children: a place where they belonged, where they had something to believe in, a refuge where they all were accepted and forgiven, no matter what they did. They could tell one another about their latest escapade breaking the law, boast about it or laugh about it, and no one would report them to the police. Louis and Elvie never went to church. They were too busy “on the show,” Charlie explained. And, he said, “they didn’t agree with the church.” The churches in Texas, whether they were Baptist, Methodist or Church of Christ, would have made them feel uncomfortable, even disreputable. Holding on to one another was simpler and more satisfying for the Bogles. This closeness, though, had the unintended effect of reinforcing the examples that Louis and Elvie set. It meant that the children had a crimped sense of values and aspirations. Instead of picking up bad habits from what criminologists now call “deviant peers” at school—their classmates—the Bogles were their own deviant peers.

  When Dude came home from the war at the end of 1945, with no additional education, job skills or self-discipline, he returned to his vagabond life of petty crime, which quickly began to escalate. He was arrested in Topeka, Kansas, in 1946 for vagrancy; arrested and jailed in Paris in 1947 for burglary; and indicted for carrying a gun and committing another burglary in Portland, Oregon, also in 1947. After the last incident, an Oregon judge sentenced him to a year on probation and ordered him to return to Texas. Instead, Dude went looking for Charlie, who was working in a logging camp on the Oregon coast near Tillamook. Charlie had picked up his own minor charges in the late 1940s: an arrest for being drunk, another for stealing a woman’s pocketbook and an assault. As time passed, Charlie was more and more frequently breaking into stores and bars in Oregon and in Washington State to get food or beer, though he wasn’t caught in these cases.

  When the two brothers ultimately got together, they “hung” a freight train and then hitchhiked into the small town of Chelan in central Washington, in the Cascade Mountains. Chelan is in the Wenatchee Valley, the self-proclaimed apple capital of the world, with enormous orchards of apple and pear trees nestled between a deep blue lake and the high evergreen-covered mountains. The brothers stayed in a cabin for migrant farm laborers imported to pick the fruit trees, and on the evening of September 4, 1947, after getting drunk at a tavern with some local young women, found themselves in front of Weimer’s Jewelry Store in Chelan. In a later signed confession to the police, Charlie said he went to the back of the store and let himself in by pulling a fan out of the wall, thereby opening a hole to crawl through. “I was the only one that went in,” Charlie said. “I took about two watches and two charm bracelets and some lockets.”

  The police did not catch him that fall, and he left town. But he made the mistake of coming back to Chelan in July 1948 in search of work. The police recognized him this time, or so they thought, and he was arrested and charged with second-degree burglary. On July 21, 1948, the Chelan County Court sentenced Charlie to fifteen years in prison. He was taken to the state prison at Monroe, Washington, where his sentence was later reduced to fifteen months for good behavior. In fact, Charlie and Dude both said later, it was really Dude who broke into the jewelry store, but Dude did not go back to Chelan in 1948, and the two brothers looked so much alike that the police arrested the one they found. “I had to take the rap for Dude; it saved him a trip to the pen,” Charlie said. He was following the Bogles’ code of family loyalty.

  Charlie’s Washington State prison records reveal how tough life had been for him. Prison officials described him as illiterate, totally unable to read or write, with a serious speech impediment. The Washington authorities requested an investigation into Charlie’s circumstances at home in Amarillo before they considered whether to reduce his sentence. A long typed response came back from Mabel Ray, the director of the county welfare board in Amarillo. “The Bogles live in a very small shack-type house, built in one of the less desirable residential districts at the edge of the city,” Ray wrote. Louis worked in an automobile junkyard, and he had spent his time building their “low, squatty, little house” with what he could salvage from the junkyard, she said. It was made entirely from old battery crates, painted white. It was just about the poorest house she had ever seen in Amarillo, and it was her job to visit the homes of poor people. “Mrs. Bogle states that, for many years, they were show people,” Ray added. “Part of the time they lived in tents, sometimes they lived in converted boxcars, and occasionally, they stayed in hotels, but they were never any place very long and, as a consequence, none of the children have any education to speak of, and Charles has absolutely none. Mrs. Bogle stated that Charles had had this speech impediment since birth and that he had always been extremely sensitive about it. She stated that he had never been able to get away from the feeling that people were criticizing him and if they could not understand him the first time he became stubborn and refused to answer.”

  Elvie also advised Ray that “her mother had died in a mental institution at Wichita Falls, Texas.” Lastly, Ray reported that “the Bogles have never belonged to any of the churches and do not attend church nor Sunday school here.” Because Charlie could not read, his entertainment had been mostly movies. But Louis told Ray that since “they were having quite a struggle, they could certainly use Charles’s additional contribution to the budget” if he was released from prison. Overall, it was a bleak but candid assessment.

  Charlie was released after serving only eight months, and in April 1949 he made his way back to Amarillo. Meanwhile, Dude had drifted back to Kansas, where he had done his basic training. He met an attractive woman in Liberal, Kansas, and they went out together for a period of time. One day Dude gave her money to go shopping with him. At the store, the woman accused him of taking the money back and they argued. Perhaps Dude had been drinking. Pretty soon some of the people in the store came to her aid and called the police. She told the officers that she was only sixteen years old and that she and Dude had been sleeping together. By Kansas law, she was underage. Dude was arrested and charged with statutory rape. At trial, Dude pled not guilty. “I didn’t think I was guilty of anything—she was willing to have sex with me,” he said. “I didn’t know what statutory rape was. I was still a dumb kid.” Dude was found guilty in August 1950 and given an odd sentence, one to twenty-one years, in the state prison at Lawrence.

  Out of all this, Dude found one consolation. In the days before handguns became so common and armed robbers and drug lords replaced burglars as big-time criminals, burglars were seen as the criminal elite in the eyes of convicts. It required impressive skill to break into a safe. Burglaries also tended to net large amounts of cash. Dude used his time in the Kansas prison to make friends with burglars, and they, in turn, taught him how to crack a safe. It was a craft he would soon put to use when he was released after serving just twenty-one months. Prisons are supposed to deter inmates from committing more crime by showing them the painful price of being locked up. Deterrence is the theory behind the whole criminal justice system. But neither Dude nor Charlie had been frightened by their firs
t prison stays. “They didn’t show me anything,” Charlie said about his Washington State prison experience. And now Dude was heading back to Amarillo to rejoin Charlie and his family and whatever adventure they could find.

  [ 3 ]

  A Burglary by the Whole Family

  After Charlie got out of prison in Washington and Dude came home from prison in Kansas in 1952, Louis and Elvie were united with their children for the first time in years. They were all living in adjacent houses in Amarillo in the flat, dry, windswept Texas Panhandle, where the Great Plains to the north merge into the southwestern desert. The relentless wind was what people remembered about the place. “There is nothing between us and the North Pole but a barbed-wire fence” was the local saying. The Bogles were as poor as ever—Louis earned a mere thirty dollars a week working in the automobile junkyard, and the shack of a house he had built out of used battery crates was stained with leaking acid. At least the acid kept out the roaches, the family joked. The house had no running water, no indoor plumbing and no electricity. Elvie had given up riding her motorcycle in the carnival because of her advancing age and ever-increasing family. Their youngest child, Rooster, had arrived unplanned in 1941, when Elvie was already forty. Their neighbors in “The Flats,” the poorest section of Amarillo, puzzled over how Louis and Elvie had been able to buy four plots of land on Spruce Street for one thousand dollars apiece from a local postal worker.

  If Paris looked like the Old South, with its sharecroppers handpicking cotton on their hands and knees, Amarillo was the modern western Texas of popular imagination, with wide open spaces flat to the horizon in all directions, the views broken only by new grain elevators and rapidly spreading oil derricks. There were good jobs for men willing to work hard. Amarillo was the center of a thriving beef-cattle industry, with ranches of thousands of acres, and there were enormous irrigated fields of wheat, sorghum and cotton that were all now harvested by machines. The Army Air Corps had built a large airfield in Amarillo during World War II to take advantage of its dry climate and flat, hard terrain to prepare crews to fly B-17 bombers to pound the Germans and, later in the war, to man the big B-29s that firebombed Tokyo. The Defense Department also built a major factory in Amarillo to make artillery shells and bombs, the Pantex Army Ordnance Plant. In the 1950s, with the advent of the Cold War, the Air Force expanded the air base to accommodate the Strategic Air Command’s giant new B-52 bombers that were ready to strike the Soviet Union. And the Pantex plant was retooled by the Atomic Energy Commission to manufacture nuclear weapons. Route 66, then the main highway between Chicago and Los Angeles, cut through the center of Amarillo, and trucks roared by day and night. There were truck stops at either end of the city, and motels and steak houses for hungry travelers. Amarillo, in fact, was the fastest-growing city in the fastest-growing state at the time. So it offered opportunity. But something was holding the Bogles back again.

  The Bogles’ closest neighbors when they arrived in Amarillo in 1944 were Margaritte Garcia, her husband and their two young sons. They lived in a tiny, low-ceilinged home directly across the street. Mrs. Garcia was a descendant of the early Mexican elite, Spanish by blood, who had trekked up from Mexico City to found Santa Fe in what is now New Mexico before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620. She took an immediate liking to Louis, whom she found to be decent, quiet and hardworking, “without a bad bone in his body,” she said. But Elvie, in her words, was “mean” and “plain spoken,” or tough and vulgar.

  One time Elvie confided in her, “Unless I want something real bad, I keep my husband at bay,” meaning no sex. “He knows where his bread and butter is coming from. After I keep him away long enough, he will do anything I want.” In Mrs. Garcia’s view, “Elvie was real bossy. She managed the money and was in charge of everything.”

  The Bogles’ source of income was an enigma to the Garcias. Mr. Garcia had a steady if low-paying job in a warehouse for forty-five years, and he volunteered at the Maverick Club for Boys while Mrs. Garcia cleaned houses and babysat. All they knew about Elvie was that before coming to Amarillo she had ridden a motorcycle in the carnival and wore a helmet and riding breeches. “She never worked a day the entire time she was in Amarillo,” Mrs. Garcia said. “She was always at home during the day, and you should see the way they ate. Big roasts and coffee all the time. They set a real good table.”

  One day Mrs. Garcia saw Elvie pulling piles of brand-new girdles out of boxes. “I said, ‘Elvie, where in the world did you get all those girdles?’ ” Mrs. Garcia remembered. “Elvie said, ‘Oh, that’s one of my lawsuits,’ and she just about died laughing.” Elvie said she and a friend would go to work in a store for three or four days, maybe a week, “then we’d pop something and claim our backs was hurt and get a settlement.” Elvie said they were helped “by a shyster lawyer.” In this case, the store had paid off the resulting court settlement in merchandise, the girdles. Elvie was continuing the scams she and Louis had been doing since soon after they first met. Only now they were doing them on a serial basis. Elvie had become a grifter.

  When Louis built the battery crate house, Elvie was initially thrilled. “This is the first actual house I’ve ever had that is mine,” she told her neighbor. But soon she was complaining about it all the time, Mrs. Garcia said. “It just isn’t nice enough for me,” Elvie kept saying, according to Mrs. Garcia. So Louis built a larger house in the adjacent lot out of wood he salvaged from the junkyard. The roof was tar paper and the sides were gray vinyl and it too had an outhouse. But it had four bedrooms, practically a mansion in their neighborhood.

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  Rooster was only three years old when the Bogles settled in Amarillo, and it was clear to the Garcias that Elvie held out much hope for him, her youngest child, whom she called “the pick of the litter.” Officially, Rooster was born without a name. His Texas birth certificate shows that Louis and Elvie had a son born at 8:50 a.m. on October 12, 1941, in Wichita Falls. The space marked for “Full Name of Child” was left blank. This was not so unusual. But when Rooster found out about the omission, he believed either that Elvie was not his mother or that his parents were trying to hide something. As Rooster got older his doubts about his legitimacy got worse, and he became obsessed by that empty space, family members recalled. They thought this perceived slight may have started a brooding suspiciousness in Rooster that could turn into instant anger, rage and violence. It was not until fifteen years later, on November 22, 1956, that Elvie herself went back to Wichita Falls and petitioned the county clerk to give her youngest child an official name, Bobby Vincent Bogle.

  In the meantime, he had decided to give himself a name, Dale, which he used at school. Within the family, he was always called Rooster because from infancy “he got up before the chickens wanting his bottle and so woke up his older brothers who had to babysit him,” according to his first wife, Kathy.

  Later Rooster would boast to boys in his neighborhood that the nickname had another meaning. “They call me Rooster because I get all puffed up when I get in a fight,” he told one boy with whom he would have a fight that almost killed him.

  The earliest surviving school record for Rooster is his second-grade report card from Mrs. Heinemann’s class at Garland Elementary School in Amarillo. It shows he earned a Satisfactory in art, physical education and music—perhaps partly a product of his proficiency on the guitar, which his father had helped teach him. He was given an Unsatisfactory in arithmetic, study habits and promptness. For his full second-grade year, in 1950–51, Rooster missed almost half of the school days and was tardy for about a third of the classes he did attend. It was an early indication of Rooster’s lack of interest in education.

  As was true for his older brothers, Rooster’s parents did not make him go to Sunday school or church, nor did the family belong to any community organization such as the Maverick Club for Boys, where Mr. Garcia sent his two sons to help keep them out of troub
le.

  As he grew up, Rooster was always slight and short, and at age seventeen was only five feet eight inches tall and weighed a mere 120 pounds, this in a place where men grew tall and strong. Rooster was sensitive about his size. Charlie and Dude, of course, were big, and he liked to listen to their stories of going into bars and knocking other patrons out cold with their fists. “He wanted to be a Bogle,” Charlie recalled years later. “He wanted to be like us, only tougher, and begged us to teach him to fight,” Charlie said. Charlie and Dude gave him lessons. Always hit first, they counseled him, to keep the element of surprise, and since you are smaller, carry a weapon you can conceal. This led Rooster to walk around with a three-inch-long piece of pipe cased in adhesive tape to make his fist stronger and increase the chance of a knockout punch. It was his homemade version of brass knuckles.

  By the time Rooster was in seventh grade, at James Bowie Junior High, Mrs. Garcia’s two boys began to keep their distance from their neighbor, though they had played together when they were younger. Phillip Garcia, who was two years older than Rooster, recalled that he had become “wild,” or violent, and liked to fight. “It got so bad that I wouldn’t have anything to do with him,” Phillip said. “In fact, I wouldn’t have been caught dead with him. If I did meet up with him, I was afraid I might have been killed.”

  Dennis Lindvay, another boy in the neighborhood who was in Rooster’s seventh-grade class, decided “to play with him as little as possible because he always got in fights.” Lindvay, the son of a salesman for Llano Cemetery, only a block down the street from the Bogles’ homes, was slight himself and was as shy, polite and cautious as Rooster was pugnacious. “I never in my life saw anybody as tough as Dale, and I never saw Dale lose a fight,” Lindvay said. “Dale was like a professional boxer, the way he fought with his fists. He was very skilled and aggressive.” Lindvay began to think of Rooster as “the world’s youngest professional fighter. Nobody ever lasted long with him. When the younger boys went down, their older brothers would come out and fight Dale, and they would lose too.”