I usually use this forum to post information related to popular music history, plus occasional musing about music, sports, movies and, of course, my late life partner/fiancée/girlfriend/… Laura Carlson. I rarely use it to talk about family because … well … everyone in my family has passed away. My last close living relative, my aunt Nora, passed away in July 2019, about six weeks after Laura passed away. I was one of those who grew up as an only child and my aunt Nora, who was my mom’s only sister, didn’t have any kids from either of her two marriages. This seemed cool growing up because I was the focus of attention. Not so cool now.
You may be wondering about my father’s side of the family, and that is actually the reason for this posting as today is the 20th anniversary of the day that man who I knew to be my father passed away. I word it that way because it turns out that William Lester Baker wasn’t my biological father, a fact I found out during a rather tumultuous period of my life.
I was always under the impression that Bill Baker was my father, but there were always clues that he wasn’t. For one, I was born in January 1964 and my parents got married in June 1966. You might say that isn’t that odd, but in the 1960s, it was very out of place for a baby to be born before the parents married. My dad had been in the U.S. Army but had been discharged since 1962 I believe. Another odd fact was the fact that my birth certificate had been altered to show him as my father, but the stamp on the birth certificate is dated in 1968, a mystery I have never gotten down to solving.
I mentioned I found out the truth during a rough period in my life. In 1977, I was in eighth grade attending junior high in Westland, Michigan (a suburb of Detroit), which was when puberty hit me full force. Now, as a child, I had been singing in various school choirs since the fourth grade, doing well enough to make the all-city chorus two years in a row. I even briefly thought about pursuing a career in music there for a time. But this all came crashing down during 1977 and 1978 when puberty robbed me of my silky smooth tenor voice and made it into something else. It had actually gotten so bad that the choir teacher asked me to leave the choir class in the middle of class in front of all of my classmates, a scar I carry with me to this date. (Surprisingly, I am actually friends on Facebook with this woman, but have never said anything to her about the incident. I’m just letting bygones be bygones, I guess.) I spent the rest of the semester during that period studying in the library, mostly baseball history. This was the event that led to me pursuing a career in journalism, for whatever good or bad that has amounted to.
Anyways, against the backdrop of the onslaught of puberty and all that was associated with it, I found out that Bill Baker wasn’t my real father. During an argument between my parents. Blurted out by my mother as I was minding my own business in the living room. Imagine getting that news in that manner. At the time, my father – who was a car hauler for a company that hauled Ford vehicles across the Midwest and Northeast – was spending time with a woman who live in Toledo, Ohio, which was along one of the routes he ran frequently. I can’t remember if he ever admitted having an affair with the woman, but I know that it drove my mother to the edge of insanity. She even managed to get the woman’s address (keep in mind this is about 20 years before the internet became available to the masses) and dragged me down to Toledo so she could confront the woman, which was about an hour away. In the end, she actually befriended the woman and my dad’s dalliance came to an end. But I was still left with this information that I didn’t know what to do with.
Then, the following summer, my dad to me riding on the back of his Kawasaki Kz1000 motorcycle to go pick up some work papers at the truck yard. It was a nice, Michigan summer day, so we were wearing T-shirts, shorts, and sandals – in retrospect probably not the best idea. We were wearing our helmets at least. Anyways, we picked up his paperwork and were getting ready to enter the freeway from Michigan Avenue, which is a main drag in Southeastern Michigan. We were first at the light at the intersection. When the light turned green, he gunned the motorcycle like normal, but something went wrong with the bike. It jerked, throwing me back against the sissy bar then shot up in the air, then turning at a 45-degree, then 90-degree angle. I was tossed from the bike and skidded down the pavement about 20 yards and ended up in a ditch. My dad ended up under the bike and the kickstand partially pieced the skin around his ankle. My dad got the bike off of him, checked to make sure I was OK, then limped across the street to a gas station to call my mom. She came to get me and my dad managed to ride the mangled bike the 3 miles homes. Surprisingly, neither one of us sustained major injuries but did suffer vast amounts of road rash – to the point that we had to lay in the living room for about a week to 10 days while our skin healed. I remember what a big deal it was when I was well enough to go to 7-Eleven with my mom. Anyways, the bike accident both bonded us and drove a wedge between us, mostly because I don’t think he ever forgave himself for putting my life at risk. I say that because looking at my helmet later, I say that had a slight crack in it and had a major portion of it scraped away, which would have been a corner of my head had I not been wearing a helmet, which wasn’t a law at the time.
So, even though my dad may or may not have had an affair, that was the only negative thing I really remember about him, although my parents argued a lot. Probably mostly about money, but I never knew because I would drown them out. Our relationship was … fine. I never remember wanting for anything. When I was in first grade, I started reading at a seventh- and eighth-grade level, and my first-grade teacher, Miss Aileen Kideckel, wanted to skip me a grade and move me from first grade to third grade. However, we were living in Detroit at the time and she felt that a) the Detroit school education system might not be adequate to teach someone as gifted as me and b) once other students found out that I had skipped a grade, they might make my life at school a bit more difficult. My dad realized what we had to do and that was when he and my mom decided to move to the suburbs and purchase their first home.
As a trucker, he was on the road as much as 80 hours a week, so he was often away and, when he was home, he was often tired. But when he could, he was available for me. We had a garage built a couple of years after we moved to our new home and he made sure that I had a basketball hoop on it. On Sundays during the warmer months, we often had a catch in the backyard. He taught me how to shoot a bow and arrow and BB guns, eventually teaching me how to shoot real handguns and rifles. He even tried to teach me how to box, but after I bloodied his nose one time, that training stopped. The best thing he ever did was when he and my mom bought me my own billiard table for Christmas (I was 9 years old, I believe). I learned how to shoot pool and got very good. He and his buddies would shoot pool sometimes too. In fact, my first drinking experience came from one of these times. We were playing 8-ball and the loser had to drink a shot of whiskey. I won the first three or four games, then realized I could drink if I lost. So, I tanked a couple of games and got my first taste of alcohol. He caught on, though, and made sure I made my way to bed.
Like I said, he was a good dad. We got crossways a few times and the belt or the “board of education” would make an appearance, but I usually probably had it coming, such as the time I broke a stained glass window in the family room with a football and tried to fix it with crazy glue. Sunlight was not my friend in this case. So, discipline was one of his string suits, but we did have some things in common. I got my love of auto racing through him. Although he was never a fan of team sports, we enjoyed watching boxing matches together and certain other events. While my mom and Laura had a bigger influence on my musical tastes, some of it comes from my dad as well. He was a fan of old country music – think Charley Pride, Charley Rich, and George Jones – plus instrumental music, which I love, too.
However, as I got older, we grew apart. Part of it was because of the fact that we had to move from Michigan to Texas in the summer before my senior year of high school. The auto industry was in a bad way in 1979 and 1980, and my dad’s car-hauling company was suffering. Then, its treasurer embezzled $13 million from the company and put it out of business. My dad spent most of the spring of 1980 trying to find work but couldn’t. Then, he got an offer for a job in Houston, which was close to where my Aunt Nora and Uncle Gene were living, so he went down there to stay with them and got the job, which was hauling chemicals for a chemical company in Houston. However, that meant getting uprooted before my senior year, not being able to go to the University of Michigan (because I wouldn’t be able to afford the out-of-state tuition), and being removed from all of the friends I had made in the past eight years. I kind of always blamed him for all of this, even though most of it was out of his control. I kind of ended up loafing my way through my senior year, killing any chance I had at any scholarships (even though I got accepted at every school I applied to, including Michigan) and ended up going to the University of Houston, which is a fine school and I am proud to be a Cougar. But it was never my first choice.
I lived at home until I was 20, and then for the next eight years, I would see him and my mom whenever I went to their house for family gatherings. However, we never really had much to say to each other. Usually, he would gripe at me about how long my hair was or about why I wasn’t maintaining my vehicle better. It was a routine that we settled into easily.
After that, I became what I like to refer to as a “journalism gypsy” (hence the name of the blog), which took me to North Texas, New York City, Florida, back to Texas, back to Florida, Rhode Island, Nebraska, Minnesota, Long Island, and Georgia. So, by this time, my relationship with my dad was reduced to answering the phone with a “Hello. Here’s your mother.” Sometimes, we would talk politics (we were aligned politically for some reason), but our talks were very brief. The last time I saw him before the end would have been sometime in 1994, which was when Laura and I left Houston.
My dad never took care of himself. He was a great trucker, winning several safe driver awards for many years. However, he did make the local news once in Denver or some other Colorado city because he had a chemical leak on his truck and it created a stench throughout the city (it was nontoxic). But he didn’t take care of himself. Around 1995 or 1996, he suffered an ocular stroke and went partially blind in one eye, which meant his truck driving days were over. He was never the same after that. He bounced around doing odd jobs like security jobs or retail night stocking jobs after that, but his heart was never in them and he would eventually quit them. He developed diabetes bad enough that he had to go on dialysis two times per week and I think near the end, he had just given up.
While Laura and I were having our own rough time in Savannah, I got a call from my mom on February 26, 1992, stating that she had found my dad on the floor of the bedroom unconscious, that he was in the hospital, and that they didn’t think he would make. I made arrangements to get an emergency flight from Savannah to Houston the next day and my mom and I saw my dad. He was connected to a ventilator and showed little signs of life. She talked to his doctor who said that there wasn’t anything that could be done for him. So, the next morning, we went back to the hospital, my mom did all of the necessary paperwork, and he was taken off life support. He apparently was ready because he only lasted about 20 minutes before he succumbed to what appeared to be a diabetic coma. He was actually the first person I would see die, and it was eerily similar to the way Laura would pass 17 years later. I think about this a lot because he was 59 years old when he died and I am 58 right now. Since then, all three of my dad’s sisters have passed away as well, the last being my aunt Judy in 2018.
I think I have a mental block when it comes to my real parentage. A couple of months after my dad died, I had to go back to Texas to take care of my mom because she had her own health problems to deal with. One day, we were in her car driving around close to her neighborhood when we passed a billboard that was advertising the name of a new subdivision that was being built in the area. She chuckled when she saw the sign, and I asked her why. She said that the subdivision has the same name as your real father’s last name. I looked at it, asked her a couple of questions, and made a mental note. And promptly forgot it. I had meant to ask her about it several times years later but never got around to it. Then, I meant to ask my Aunt Nora about it and, again, never got around to it. Maybe I don’t want to know. I know a little. I know he was older than my mom, was not a student at the high school she went to and was bad news. I remember one of them – possibly my aunt Nora – telling me that he went to prison at Jackson State Penitentiary for something bad. But, again, I never followed upon it. Maybe I should. I know all of the health issues on my mom’s side of the family, but what of his side? Do I get the vitiligo I have from his side? My baldness? Maybe I should do one of those ancestry check things, although I am not sure it would even work with my messed-up birth certificate.
Maybe it’s because I don’t really need to. Flawed as he was, Bill Baker was a good dad to me. I’ve had a lot of messed-up things happen in my life and could have turned out differently. But I think because I had him as my father figure, I ended up exactly where I needed to be. I just wish I had more people to share it with.
The Journalism Gypsy 