by John Coston
Rita would wait until she was four years old to ever meet him. She remembers a man coming into the house, picking her up and swinging her around. Then he kissed her, put her back down, and left the room, going back outside with her brothers.
“Who was that?” little Rita asked her mother.
“That was your daddy.”
Some of John Booker’s discontent stemmed from family tragedy. When he was thirteen years old, he had lost his father in a horrible car-and-train accident. The last memory he had of his father was seeing him on fire, burning to death in the wreckage. John was in the accident, too, and so was his father’s sister, who also died, along with another couple and their baby. The ensuing teenage years were hard ones, and John Booker didn’t finish high school. Soon a working man, he became a drinker with a short temper that got him into frequent brawls.
Still, he and his mother lived on a large farm, making him fairly well off. Besides the main house, set on a large parcel planted in cotton, there were other pieces of land, some with houses. One by one, John sold them off, squandering the proceeds. Finally, when his mother changed the will, the final eighty-two acres with the main house was protected from his philandering. It couldn’t be sold until after her son’s death.
When he left his native Mississippi behind, he never severed his emotional links there. In 1977, when Mary Gladys suddenly died of a massive heart attack at the age of sixty-one, her errant ex-husband made a prodigal trip to her funeral. He was quite sick himself, suffering from pneumonia, but he boarded an all-night bus in St. Louis. He was overcome at her funeral. His children would never forget how hard he cried over her death.
While Ellen and her mother were understanding about his need to attend the funeral of the mother of his seven other children, it was an entirely different matter when he abandoned St. Louis a few months later. This time he moved back to Ripley, living on the Booker estate with his sons.
At the time Ellen was a junior at Roosevelt High. Her father was sixty-four-years old and in suffering health. As it would turn out, he would never really come back to live with Catherine. After almost a year passed, he returned to St. Louis and was placed in a nursing home. In June of 1979, only a matter of months later, he died of cancer.
Ellen inherited her one-eighth share of the farm, which a stepbrother later bought, but John Booker’s legacy for her was mostly pain and betrayal. Before becoming an absentee father, he has been characterized as rigid and emotionally unavailable. Often he was drunk and abusive. Like many children of alcoholics, Ellen would marry the first man who paid real attention to her, and he would turn out—in the most fateful way—to be in some ways just like her father.
A Married Man
To Ellen, Paul represented an escape from the fractured home life she had known, and a chance to build her own family. In fact, Paul wouldn’t be able to offer the stability Ellen wanted, nor the happiness, and he, too, would spend a lot of time in bars.
When he met Ellen, Paul was a married man who lived alone in an small apartment at 3830 Iowa Street. His marriage was on the rocks, and it was not destined to be rescued. What had begun as a poignant romance between a soldier at war and a young woman from Missouri was now ending in acrimony. Besides the pain of a split involving children, Paul was also responsible for a more ominous legacy to the children he left behind.
In fall of 1969, as an American in Vietnam, Paul was like every other young Army grunt, except maybe he was just a little more lonely than some. Everyone else, it seemed, would get letters from home. Paul had given up writing home to his family in California, because they never wrote back. One day a buddy showed him a fistful of letters from young women back in the States, bragging that he actually had too many to answer. Give it a try, his buddy said.
Back in St. Louis, a young mother with two children and three jobs to keep it all going got the same kind of challenge from her friends. It happened one night when she was working one of her part-time jobs at a local bowling alley. Her co-workers goaded her into picking a name out of a hat. So Susan Emily took a chance, and the name she drew as a pen pal belonged to a wiry, small soldier from California, Paul Duane Boehm. The exchange of letters that followed during the next several months turned into a long-distance love affair, and by the spring of 1970, when Paul came home on a thirty-day leave, their correspondence culminated in an engagement.
When Paul’s plane landed at Lambert Field in St. Louis, he recognized Susan’s daughters, Patricia and Cheryl, but he could only assume that the heavyset blond standing with them was his bride-to-be, because she had never sent any photographs of herself. Within a year, they were married, and only months later, Paul legally adopted Susan’s daughters. He pressed the adoption proceedings, because he was eager to make it official with the girls. Patricia and Cheryl would then share something in common with Paul, who had been adopted at birth.
Susan thought she had the best marriage any woman could want. Her husband loved her. She was seeing the world. He hadn’t balked when he first laid eyes on her, seeing that she was very overweight, which is the main reason she didn’t send him any pictures of herself. Throughout their marriage, whenever she mentioned her weight, he always assured her that he loved every one of her three hundred-plus pounds.
After his tour of duty in Vietnam ended, Paul and Susan moved to Heidelberg, Germany, where he would be stationed until the end of 1973. In Germany, they had a son, Paul Duane, Jr. From her perspective, Susan was living an exciting and happy life.
From Germany, the family moved to Fort Carson, Colorado, and later to Fort Lewis, Washington, and another child was born. Her name was Terrie Lynn. After Paul was discharged, the family came home to St. Louis, where he got a job driving for Bi-State.
But by the spring of 1978, it was over. It was clear that Paul was ready to move on. He had met a fun-loving girl on his bus route. She was young enough to be his daughter, and just like his wife, she was overweight. His attraction to Ellen Booker was true to character so far, but what was different about Paul these days was that he had begun to drink more, something Susan never had experienced with him during all of their marriage.
Susan found out something else about Paul when he moved out, and she accused him of abusing her daughters. She took him to court and he eventually consented to counseling. The matter was laid to rest. Before long, she found a way to forgive Paul. Susan wanted her life to move on.
Still, she wanted the child support he owed but never paid. Susan hounded him whenever she had a chance. It was rare for them to have much else to talk about. Once, though, when Paul discovered that his ex-wife had decided to do something about her weight, he was surprised to learn that with some surgery and dieting, Susan was now a trimmer 155 pounds.
“Why didn’t you ever do that for me?” he asked.
It was clear that Paul liked what he saw, even though he also had never once complained about her weight, but instead had found a way to flatter her on the subject. These pleasant exchanges were sometimes quick to degenerate.
“What did you ever do for me?” Paul griped.
As Paul began planning his marriage to Ellen, he rented the upper flour of a house on Wyoming Street. Ellen was gung-ho about living together, and she had found the place. At the time the rent was only $100 a month, which for Paul was a bargain because he had been paying $150.
The new apartment was very nice, too. There were three large rooms and a yard out back. It provided them all the basics, though not much more, to start a marriage. After a year passed, the owner, an old woman who lived on the first floor, began to have health problems. When she decided to sell the house, Paul and Ellen were given first crack. He was pleased to discover that the house was a worthwhile investment. It was structurally sound, and with a few minor improvements, he learned, it would pass the Veterans Administration requirements for a mortgage. The neighborhood was a modest but respectable one. The streets were lined with solid, redbrick homes.
The first thing the new homeowner
s did was move into the downstairs flat, so they could rent out the upstairs. In time, after Ellen’s mother lost her job and Paul and Ellen began helping her out with electric and gas bills, Paul decided to offer to let her move in with them. He fixed up the basement and Catherine moved in downstairs. While Ellen’s mother had to share the bath with her daughter and son-in-law and grandchildren, she had a modicum of independence down in the basement. There was a microwave and a refrigerator, and she had privacy, plus her own entrance. She didn’t have to pay rent or utilities or even a phone bill, because Paul ran an extension line down to her.
The only problem was a big one. Ellen never wanted her mother to move in to begin with: This was to be her new beginning. She had imagined what it would be like, and that fantasy did not include her mother living in the basement. With Paul, plus this home on Wyoming Street, she could start her own family. She would have it all: the home, the family, and the man to share it with. Where did her mother fit into all this?
In the first year, a daughter, Stacy Ann, was born. In September of 1982, when Stacy was a year old, they bought the house on the GI Bill. Two years after that, Ellen would become pregnant with a second child, and then another.
By this time, cracks were already developing, and a major reason was the bizarre and fantastic world of professional wrestling. Early on, Paul had discovered that his bride-to-be was fascinated with it. At first he wondered whether this passion for the National Wrestling Association, known by its shorthand acronym as the NWA, would be a passing stage. He soon got the answer. Ellen’s zeal for the sport was such that she attended matches whenever, and almost wherever, she could. Certainly, if there was a match in town at Kiel Auditorium, Ellen would be there.
During the first year of their marriage, Paul went along with Ellen, though he never shared her excitement for the matches. He just wanted to spend time with his new wife, going out for the night. That year Paul and Ellen bought season tickets for the local matches. Ellen was tickled that they got seats in the fourth row, and they went to every match.
The following year, they would again get season tickets, and the year after that, Paul discovered himself being dragged along again, even though his interest was falling off. These circuslike events make for outrageous entertainment for the majority of the sport’s buffs, but to Ellen it was much, much more. Paul soon started to find it hard to sit through the matches, and couldn’t understood his wife’s passion for the fakery of it all. In fact, he never would.
On one fateful night, in a packed Kiel Auditorium, another newlywed couple sat right in front of Paul and Ellen. They, too, had season tickets, and just like Paul and Ellen, it was the wife who was the real fan.
Deanne Smith had been married in the fall of 1980. Like Ellen, Deanne had insisted on getting season tickets, but her new husband was more reserved about mingling in crowds than she was. He used to rib her about how she would dive into a conversation with anybody who would listen, and his gentle kidding about it soon turned to griping, because it really did make him uncomfortable. He used to joke with her that she would probably resort to talking with a goat, if there were no one else available, as long as it nodded its head or acted as if it were paying attention.
Deanne wasn’t going to be bridled, even by her new husband. She soon picked up on Ellen’s enthusiasm about the matches, and before long, Deanne was turning around to talk to the fanatic sitting behind her.
Ellen and Deanne were two of a kind in a number of ways. Deanne had been working as a legal secretary at Kortenhof Ely, on Locust Street downtown. Besides being a newlywed who was crazy about professional wrestlers, Deanne could see that she and Ellen shared something else that fostered an empathy between the two of them. Deanne, like Ellen, was grossly overweight.
Ellen had found it hard to shed the extra weight she had put on when she carried Stacy, and by the time she was pregnant with Steve, which was when she first met Deanne, it was starting to look like a losing battle. Deanne, being slightly taller, could find ways to more easily hide an extra twenty pounds than Ellen could, but twenty pounds here or there wasn’t the issue. Deanne weighed more than three hundred pounds. In fact, her exact weight was three hundred and thirty-two pounds.
In no time, the two women became friends. They talked about wrestling, about diets, about clothes, and about their husbands. Though at first, their only contact was at Kiel Auditorium, their friendship was fated to become more than occasional.
One reason was that their marriages were failing. Ellen noticed that Deanne’s husband had stopped coming to the matches. Deanne noticed the same thing about Paul. Deanne would still bring her stepson, but that changed when Deanne realized that her marriage would be short-lived, and that the boy would soon have a new stepmother. What was the point of bringing her stepson anymore?
When Deanne told Ellen that she was going to start using her maiden name, Bond, again because she was getting a divorce, Ellen was sympathetic. Deanne gave Ellen her phone number at home, and they soon became phone friends at night after work.
Deanne appreciated the moral support. Sometimes Ellen would call just to see how Deanne was doing. As the calls became more regular, Deanne didn’t mind. In fact, she enjoyed the conversation with Ellen. After a while, Deanne was beginning to realize, as sometimes one does without saying it to the other party on the line, that the calls from Ellen were serving some important purpose for Ellen was well. Deanne was learning about how lonely Ellen was.
Paul wasn’t coming to the matches anymore, and he also wasn’t coming right home after work. In his place, Ellen would drag along a girlfriend or two to Kiel, and she was finding solace in what became daily phone contact with Deanne. They would only talk for a few minutes, and it could be about anything.
In was during this time, in the spring of 1984, that Ellen’s stepsister visited St. Louis. Now a woman with a family of her own, Rita felt a family obligation to look up her relative. She also knew that Ellen was the only one who could help her find their father’s grave, which Rita wanted to visit.
When she called Ellen’s home, Paul answered.
“Yeah, come on over,” he said, sounding excited to have Ellen’s relatives visit. “I’ll give you directions.”
So Rita and her husband, along with her son and her husband’s sister and his brother-in-law, drove to the Boehm house on Wyoming. Rita was not completely comfortable around Paul, but everyone was polite when he opened the door and invited them in. Catherine was there, along with Stacy, who was about a year younger than Rita’s son, but the place was messy. Rita was embarrassed for her husband’s family.
“Ellen’s getting off work,” Paul said. “Why don’t you just come with me and we’ll pick her up.”
Rita was cringing at the thought, looking at everyone else, trying to say: “Help me out of this. I don’t want to go with this guy.”
But there was no polite way of getting out of it.
When they met Ellen, Rita was sorry that her stepsister didn’t seem very cordial, even though Paul was effusively positive and felt an obligation to show Rita around St. Louis. Rita was sandwiched in the front seat between the diminutive Paul and an overweight Ellen, who was carrying a package of doughnuts. When they finally got back to the house, Rita was more than ready to move on, but they all went back inside again.
Ellen opened up the doughnuts, and got herself a soda to wash them down. Rita listened as her sister-in-law, a devout Christian, was attempting to make small talk with Paul.
“What do you do for a living?”
“Oh, I’m kinda like horseshit. I’m all over the place. I drive a bus.”
Rita thought she would die. When they finally left, she felt she had met her obligation, but didn’t plan to look Paul and Ellen up again, ever.
By the following year, Ellen and Paul really had their hands full. Stacy was almost five. Paul was still driving the Cherokee route for Bi-State, but spending less time at home after work, and Ellen was developing her own cycle: She was preg
nant again. The child was due in late summer, and she and Deanne talked often about how Ellen would take another proscribed pregnancy leave from her secretarial job at Marshall & Stevens.
On September 22, 1985, a boy was born. He was named Steven Michael. Then almost overnight, Ellen got pregnant again. She and Paul decided that after this third child arrived, she wouldn’t go back to work. Ellen had been at Marshall & Stevens for almost five years, but lately an impatience about her salary had become a nagging irritation. She didn’t make enough money, and she talked about it all the time. So it came as some kind of relief to her bosses when she told them she wouldn’t be coming back.
The problem was, the marriage was not solid enough to take this kind of change. Quite aside from their finances, there was little harmony left in the relationship. Paul was spending more and more time in the neighborhood taverns. Ellen was developing a new fantasy that bordered on compulsion, and at the center of that world were the managers and performers on the professional wrestling circuit.
Most of the time they drove. Deanne and Ellen would take turns behind the wheel, and it didn’t matter how far they had to go. They were real fans.
Once, over the long Memorial Day weekend in 1986, Deanne and Ellen pulled a marathon roadtrip. Starting out in the morning in St. Louis, they drove southwest across the state to Joplin for a show that night. The next morning, at the break of day, they jumped back into the car and headed southeast through Arkansas into Louisiana to catch up with the same performance that would be held that night. They didn’t arrive in Monroe until four in the afternoon, but it was just in time to check into a motel and grab a bite to eat before the match. The next day they got back in the car and drove north to Little Rock to catch a third performance. Afterward, they were still hundreds of miles from home and facing a seven-hour trip home, but Ellen was sated.
Deanne knew how nuts Ellen was about wrestling, and by now the managers and referees knew, too. Deanne and Ellen were regulars. They were recognized on sight. Some of the performers also knew them, especially one whom Ellen had followed from the day she saw her first match. His name was Ted DiBiasi, but he is better known on the circuit as The Million Dollar Man. Ellen watched and followed him for six years, and she religiously wrote to him. The letters were mailed to the arenas where he would be performing, with the hope that the receipt of her adoring letter would be fresh in his mind when he saw her at ringside.
