Zero to Sixty in Sixty Years: A Bipolar Success Story

ZERO to SIXTY in Sixty Years

Abbott Press

Chapter One

There were some differences between the conditions described in Steinbeck's book that was set in the late 1930s and those that existed in California in the late '40s and early '50s. The Joads, the family whose life is chronicled in The Grapes of Wrath, were saddled with unbearable odds against ever finding a home. My dad busted his butt, made ranch foreman, and bought a house while we were living in California. He and Mom worked there for three years, saving money but living decently. It could not have been easy for them. They were tough people.

My parents saved enough money, and along with the proceeds of the house they bought and sold in California, they moved back to Oklahoma with their two sons, and Dad bought a house with five acres. It wasn't a very good house, but it kept us for a few years while he built a three-bedroom house for us. He moved our old house to the back of our five acres, renovated it, and rented it out. Later, he moved that house to some land he bought across the street from us.

Our land backed up to open land that was owned by the public school district. Dad bought the five acres next to us, tore down the old house that was on it, and had an engineer subdivide the ten acres. He then built a street and started building houses.

He felt a little cramped, having created a subdivision around his home, so he found a beautiful sixteen-acre undeveloped parcel on the same street but farther away from the town of Riverdale. This was some pretty land with lots of big trees and a creek running through it. He renovated an old house on the new property and sold the house he built after we returned from California. He lived in the renovated house while he built a nice brick home right in the middle of the sixteen acres. He then sold the old house to a buyer who moved it away.

Everything my dad touched made money. You may be wondering where all the money to buy these houses and properties came from. In a nutshell, it came from Dad's hard work and uncanny talent for seeing deals. It also helped that he grew up with the son of a bank owner and had an excellent history with them. He could get anything he asked for at their bank. There were a lot of us who watched him as he advanced who wondered if he could ever make a mistake. He had a mind that was half computer and half steel trap, and he definitely wasn't lazy.

In addition to building houses, Dad started messing with dirt-moving equipment. In the '60s, when I was getting bigger, he had a business that manufactured and installed septic tanks and drain fields, and he also hired out a string of earth-moving equipment. He was well known for being fair and for doing good work.

By the mid-'60s, he wasn't doing the physical work in his businesses. He had two of my uncles on Mom's side, me, and various other people doing the work while he stayed busy lining out work ahead of us and making deals. The deals he made were usually for real estate, but he would buy and sell almost anything, and he would make money. He collected rent from commercial and residential properties.

Not long after buying the sixteen acres that he made his home, he bought the adjoining fifteen acres that had a street and had been subdivided into six two-and-a-half-acre lots. I'll discuss his plan for this property later in the book.

This is where Dad really started a strong cash flow. I mentioned that he bought some land across the street from the original five acres he owned. Well, he bought a lot of it. The soil was sandy from ground level to the water table, and the sand was perfect for construction fill and asphalt mixtures. It could be worked even during rainy days. Some of the land had already been mined, and there were pits where the sand had been taken out and sold. He saw those holes and the surrounding sand as an opportunity to make some money.

Dad started a landfill business and started selling sand. He would let huge garbage trucks dump their loads on his land. His workers would then compact the trash with big tractors and create new holes while in the process of digging a daily cover material for the trash and selling sand. This, of course, perpetuated the existence of holes to be filled with trash. He got paid to dig the hole, and he got paid to fill the holes with trash.

This went on for years, and during one period of more than two years, there were hundreds of truckloads of his sand bought and used in the construction of a huge automobile glass plant.

By the time he finished, he had a large parcel of land that was very well located. It became very valuable as land for an industrial park. He sold land to the public school district that became a bus garage and parking lot. He also sold some to a large construction company as a storage area for their equipment, and he sold land to a ready-mix concrete company that mined the sand from the adjacent river. Dad got rich selling that land. It would be interesting to compare the careers of my La Jolla, California, friend who had me sized up at the reunion and that of my dad. He might be surprised at how resourceful an Okie can be.

Chapter Two

It may seem odd that as I tell my story, I am writing a lot about my father. However, it's not possible to tell much about myself without acknowledging the effect my father had on my development. I would be irresponsible if I didn't say how proud and grateful I am that he worked as hard as he did to provide for our family. Bringing his family to California to find work took a lot of courage and commitment. And later, his success as a businessman really did good for a lot more people than just himself. There are a number of things about my father that are genuinely above average.

Have you ever known someone who you knew had some good qualities but seemed to show them only to people outside his or her family? Is there someone you know who you instinctually want to love but he or she won't let you? In my life, that person is my father—or rather, that once was the case.

Dad could do the math in his head to make a deal, and he had the knowledge and skills to accomplish just about anything he decided to do, but he couldn't make the connection that if you feel you have to terrorize someone, at least don't do it to your family. If a person treats his family nicely, they might actually love him and cherish his company. My dad didn't know this. To him, his family members were people he had to control and punish when they were not kissing his butt. Hardly a day would pass where my sweet mother wouldn't declare, "When your father gets home, he's going to blister your ass." And sure enough, he would. I think he enjoyed throwing his weight around. My parents were quite the team.

As I grew, it occurred to me that something had to be wrong with a mother who constantly set her sons up for some brutal beatings. And as I grew more, it occurred to me that she did it to make her husband happy. Dad didn't spare her from physical abuse, but maybe she thought she could placate him by sacrificing her sons, specifically my older brother and me. It was as if she expected a reward for ratting us out. My younger brother, Dan, was brought up much differently and didn't suffer as much violence. For some reason, Mom chose to protect him.

This was a typical evening at our house. After beating his sons, Dad would sit down to a good meal (Mom was a very good cook) that was always ready when he came home. Verbal darts and arrows would start to fly between my parents. I can't think of a time when she was not the one to start it, and I can't think of a time when he didn't wade right into it.

And then the battle would rage. Every night, from supper to the time when they would finally go to bed, they would curse each other, physically hurt each other, and say some of the stupidest things you can imagine. One thing I remember is that he forbade her from shaving her legs and armpits. He thought women who shaved their legs and armpits were whores. He had been raised in a family that was very religious (i.e., the Assembly of God church), and apparently they have some interesting beliefs. She would do it anyway, and the war would continue.

My dad was a bully toward his little boys and his woman. You might lay most of the blame on him because of his physical strength, but you should know that Mom never disappointed him. She would curse and spit and match his every offense. An ample amount of abuse traveled in both directions. My mother had a tone of voice she would use that sounded like it came straight from hell when she and Dad were fighting or if she was angry with her sons. I can still hear that voice. There have been few things I have heard since then that sound uglier to me. There were times when I think Dad wanted to rest and she would start stirring things up with that voice, and there they went again. And there was never a time when Dad didn't let her sucker him into a fight. Neither peace nor love existed in our house. My parents each seemed to subsist on chaos. Our house was a battlefield.

While I'm on this subject, I need to address another one of the seriously stupid, very hurtful, and destructive, things I heard literally every night when I was a child. In their fights, Dad would never fail to remind Mom, and everyone in the house, "You didn't even want Robbie Lee." Here's a tip: if you want to screw up a kid for life, start him out believing that he was not wanted as part of the family, and then just don't do or say anything to repair the damage.

Although I grew up knowing that I had severe self-esteem issues, it wasn't until I was sixty years old that I put together Dad's comment and my own troubled life. This is where my mother came down on this.. I think that during the time they were working so hard in California, she got pregnant, and she probably made a comment to him that they surely didn't need another baby right about then. Dad picks up on things like that, and he will twist things around so that he looks like either the martyr or the hero. If you let a bad event happen, he will never let you forget it. He keeps score.

I think Mom probably did say something like that but probably wished she could take it back. But the bottom line is this: at no time in my life has she ever mitigated that comment. She never got me alone and told me to ignore Dad's rants and that I was a loved child. I never remember her using the L-word until she became old and single and started going to church. I hope she has her business right with God. She has made no effort to square things with me.

It has occurred to me after spending a lot of my adult life trying to make peace in the family, and even trying to use the L-word, that my family has neither the capability nor the desire to know proper love. It seems the things they love are drama, hurt, and misery.

It was also in my sixtieth year that it became clear that Dad's motivation to succeed didn't come because he wanted to advance his family. He wanted to have a family, but he kept them controlled. From the beginning, even before our family moved to California, I believe that he wanted to be a big shot. He knew that to be a good big shot, he needed money, and he needed some people he could control. It was fortunate for him that he had the courage and the ability to accomplish his goals. It was unfortunate that he was unwilling to pass some of that talent and ability on to his sons. It seemed that he just couldn't allow us to acquire abilities that might eclipse his accomplishments. He might lose control.

I never understood why he didn't pass the torch until I met a man in the mid-'90s in Swansboro, North Carolina, who was maybe twenty years older than me. He was, by his own admission, a jerk, but he was very smart and interesting, and he was always very alert during our conversations. On one of our visits, we were talking about family, and he told me that his adult sons hated him. He made the comment, "I didn't let my sons beat me at anything." Whoa! Until that moment, I never thought it was possible that a father could, or would, intentionally hold back his sons like that. It had just never occurred to me.

I was impressed with a comment that a US senator from one of the southern states made about his father. He said, "My father didn't want me to follow his footsteps. He wanted me to stand on his shoulders and reach for things higher." A thought like that never entered my father's head. None of us, including Mom, were supposed to become independent.

You've always heard that your parents did the best they could, and I think my parents did all the things the law required—the food, clothes, and shelter type things— very well. They did everything they were supposed to do for their sons to finish high school. Two out of three of us graduated.

The things that they were totally lousy at prevented our family, and each individual member of the family, from becoming well adjusted and happy. My father was determined to dominate and control his family, and he knew that if he could prevent each family member from bonding, his job would be easier and more successful. There has never been a time in our lives when my brothers and I were close and supportive of each other. Our parents never encouraged us to be friends but instead, seemed to put us in contention with each other. Even as adults, the usual subject when talking with Dad would be bad mouthing whichever brother that wasn't there at the moment. He seldom had anything positive to say.

One of the things our parents made us do came about when we got big enough to walk ourselves to a church in our little town. My parents didn't go to church. The church was the church my father's sister, Sherry, and their mother attended. It was an Assembly of God church.

Dad built his mother a little house just next door to his sister. He also built his sister's house and helped them finance it. Each and every time one or more of us went to visit Grandma, she would get the Spirit and start speaking in tongues. It seemed the only subject she was interested in was evangelizing. When we got older and had our own cars, we limited our exposure to her. We also didn't go to church anymore.

With all this intense religion around them, my grandmother, another of Dad's sisters, and Dad humiliated and berated Sherry's husband, who was sick and could not work, for so long and so often that he shot and killed himself. They literally tormented him to his grave. I didn't live with my uncle, but I never thought of him as being a bad guy.

I believe in the gospel completely, and toward the end of this book, I'm going to tell you how it is working for me in a day-to-day, even minute-by-minute, way. I don't think people should use religion to beat other people up or think that their beliefs make them superior to anyone else.

Chapter Three

In the '60s, my brother Tim and I were getting some size, and the physical violence from Dad stopped. I can imagine that Dad might have thought one of us (i.e., I) would kick his butt, and he didn't want that to happen. I had been working very hard for him doing manual, strenuous labor, and you could argue that I was among the strongest boys in our school, even as a sophomore. Tim worked in grocery stores, and I don't remember him doing the really hard labor stuff.

And I could fight. When we were youngsters, Dad threatened us with his belt if we backed down from a fight. I'm not making this up. Once he forced Tim and me to call out a couple of boys from our neighborhood for them to engage in combat with us, and he would break out his belt on us if we didn't. He believed violence solved problems. He actually whipped me across my back and legs with his belt to teach me to ride a bicycle. I have seen him resort to violence and threats with people who were not in our family. I think it is interesting that he never did violence to a person he was unsure he could beat.

As we grew older, our parents began using different tactics to deal with each other. They slowed down the physical stuff. I suspect that as we became older, there became too many reliable witnesses to their insane behavior. My suspicion seemed to be confirmed, as later, when we were all out of the home, they started hand-to-hand violence again. Dad thought that if he used his knuckles to hit Mom on the head, there would be nothing for others to see, and yet it would achieve his goal, which, obviously, was to cause her as much physical pain as he thought he could get by with. He also enjoyed pulling swatches of hair from her head. Her hairdresser thought she had a disease.

Their behavior toward each other was almost always a negative thing. My own behavior, particularly toward Mom, wasn't very good either. I think I just didn't like her. She had a mean spirit. Unlike with my older brother, she and I never connected. Today she and Tim are very close, or so it appears. My younger brother is in prison.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from ZERO to SIXTY in Sixty Years by ROBERT LEE TRENT Copyright © 2011 by Robert Lee Trent. Excerpted by permission of Abbott Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---