Dear George,
J’s alma mater, Walnut Hills High, has an illustrious history with many distinguished graduates. If you were to ask teachers and administrators about famous alumni they would probably mention James Levine, director of the Metropolitan Opera; Jim Dine, pop artist; Tony Trabert, world-renowned tennis star; Jonathan Valin, famed mystery novelist; or even Theda Bara, silent film star. If you ask the students, however, only two names are popular: Jerry Rubin, 1960’s radical activist and founder of the Yippies: and Charles Manson, charismatic leader of the ill-fated Manson Family. Rubin and Manson were from the same stormy era in the late 60’s. Rubin, in fact, once wrote of Charlie Manson, “His words and courage inspired us.”
“Charles Manson” was not his original name. According to his initial hospital record, No Name Maddox was born on Nov. 12, 1934, at General Hospital in Cincinnati. His mother, Kathleen Maddox, was an impoverished sixteen-year-old who has been described as a heavy drinker and a teenage prostitute. Several days after the birth, she did name him Charles Milles Maddox. Her parents and her grandmother were strict religious fanatics who forbid dancing or even talking to boys, and Kathleen ran away from home in 1933 at age 15. While Maddox’s father has never been established with certainty, Kathleen filed a bastardy suit against one Colonel Scott of Ashland, KY, winning a child support settlement of five dollars per month (though she never received the money). To provide her baby with a legitimate name, Kathleen married laborer William Manson, but he abandoned his teenage wife and stepson shortly afterward. Charlie never knew his biological father, and his mother had a habit of disappearing for days or weeks at a time, leaving him with his grandmother or his aunt. In 1939 Kathleen and her brother Luther Maddox were sentenced to the penitentiary for armed robbery of a service station, and five-year-old Charlie was sent to live with his extremely religious aunt and uncle in McMechen, WV. His uncle constantly berated him for being a sissy and sent him to school on the first day dressed in girl’s clothes. Kathleen took him back when she was released from jail, but provided little in the way of mothering as she brought home lovers of both sexes and moved from one dingy hotel room to another. Reportedly, a waitress in a bar jokingly offered to buy Charles from her, and Kathleen gave him to her for a pitcher of beer, then walked out and disappeared until his uncle came to search for him days later.
At nine Manson was sent to reform school for stealing, then again at age 12. He ran away and tried to return to his mother, but she rejected him, and he lived on his own by stealing and burglary until he was caught and sent to Father Flanagan’s Boys Town. He returned to Cincinnati and attended junior high at Walnut Hills High School. When his mother’s boyfriend didn’t want him around, she tried unsuccessfully to find a foster home for her son, but he was instead convicted for armed robbery and sent to the Indiana School for Boys in Terre Haute where he has said that he was sexually brutalized. He and two other boys escaped and headed for California, living by burglary and auto theft, but got caught and sent to the National Training School for Boys in Washington, D.C. Though illiterate, Manson’s tested I.Q. was 109 (and later measured as 121 at McNeil Island Penitentiary). He scored high on aptitude for music and listed his religion as Scientology. A caseworker described him as aggressively anti-social. On the verge of being paroled, he sodomized a boy in a Virginia reformatory, then was transferred to a more secure institution in Chillicothe, OH. Paroled at age 19, he lived briefly with his aunt and uncle, then his mother, and married 17-year-old waitress Rosalie Jean Willis, who he supported through odd jobs and auto theft. He drove a stolen car with his pregnant wife to California where he was jailed again. Willis gave birth to his first son, Charles M. Manson, Jr., but then left town with the baby and a truck driver.
The rest is well-known history. Following his release from prison in 1967, Manson moved to San Francisco where he formed a quasi-commune in California, composed mainly of young, upper middle class women from emotionally disturbed backgrounds. At that point he was an unemployed ex-convict who had spent half his life in correctional institutions for a variety of minor offenses, e.g., car theft, forgery, credit card fraud. He became obsessed with death and “Helter Skelter,” his interpretation of a Beatles song in which he predicted a race war in America. In 1969 he was convicted of conspiracy in connection with his follower’s gruesome murders of Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate, another Los Angeles couple, and Gary Hinman. The crime scenes contained messages scrawled in the victims’ blood proclaiming Manson’s “philosophy”. Though his cult members did the actual killing, Manson said, “Believe me, if I started killing people, there’d be none of you left.”
Though Manson received the death sentence in 1970, this was reduced to life imprisonment when the state Supreme Court temporarily abolished the death penalty in 1972. Recently turned 75, Manson is currently an inmate at Corcoran State Prison. If you want to send him a belated birthday card, his address is: Charles Manson B33920 4A 3R 14L P.O Box 3476 Corcoran, CA 93212.
Love,
Dave
-G-Mail Comments:
-Phyllis SS (1-25): Manson is from Cincinnati and went to Walnut Hills? How interesting. He must have had a brain that functioned at one time. Poor kid - what a life. I am not going to send him a birthday card - did you?
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