Stepenoff - The dead end kids of St. Louis: homeless boys and the people who tried to save them

THERE ARE LOTS OF REASONS WHY WRITERS choose the topics of their books. Most of them are personal. The reason I wrote this book is personal: because my own father could easily have been a dead end kid, a high school dropout hanging around the bowling alley and the pool hall, without a future. After his father died, he worked as a pin boy in a bowling alley. Although he had a mother and an older sister, they were grief stricken and unable to cope with a wild and angry teenage boy.

At the age of seventeen, he fathered a child and married my mother, but the marriage did not last. Still in his late teens, he headed for California with a local reprobate named Killer Cane. They had a few adventures, met a few celebrities, briefly worked in an aircraft plant, found a variety of other jobs, and then came back home. My father came back to his wife and child. Killer Canes mother, who taught gym at my grade school, thought my father was a bad influence on her son. She never forgave me for being my fathers daughter. One day, while the class was marching in line, she deliberately stomped on my foot. My great-aunt Helen, the cafeteria lady, came running out onto the playground and shouted at her, warning her never to do such a thing again. My father was in the service at the time. Uncle Sam wanted him. He was drafted into the United States Army during peacetime in the late 1950s.

In the service, my father became a bit of a star, skiing with frauleins in the Alps and traveling around Europe with the Armys bowling team. He sent me a postcard from Brussels, a doll in a little red hood, and a musical alarm clock with a ballerina that moved up and down. I still have the letters he wrote to me while my mother and I lived in a small apartment, waiting for him to come home, and when he did come home, we found out that he had fallen in love with Beethoven and Verdi. He bought a stereo and played classical music at top volume.

After his tour of duty, he got a job selling office equipment and bought us a brick ranch-style house in a subdivision. This was middle-class life. He and my mother sent me to a good public school, and they entertained neighbors at dinner parties. They even drank the stereotypical martinis, and it seemed for a while that he had overcome his hard adolescence and found a way to live the good life, but it did not last very long.

He died of lung cancer at the age of thirty-five. Yes, he smoked cigarettes, but the likely cause of his cancer was exposure to asbestos during his late teens and early twenties, when he worked in a variety of places, including the blast furnace of a steel mill. He was gone before his life really got started, before anyone could find out what he might have been or done.

My fathers story is not unique or even terribly dramatic. He did not die in battle or end up in prison. As a matter of fact, he was one of the lucky ones. He got a taste, at least, of the American dream. But it is a sad storya story of wasted potential. Nobody wanted it to happen. Nobody planned it. But it happened because people failed to nurture and protect a vulnerable growing boy. The same thing has happened time and again. That is why I wrote this book.