Willene very quickly laid down the law that we could spend but a day, at most, with mom per month and that was it. We were too difficult once we came back from those monthly visits with her. However, for the Labor Day weekend of 1960, Grandma Breeze was visiting from White Cloud, Kansas, and wanted to spend that weekend with two of her grandkids. Dad was not home, but Willene was and told mom that we could not go with her, regardless of the unique circumstances. I met with them at the front door of the Lomita triplex and desperately wanted to go but knew I would be in terrible trouble if I did. Perhaps they jointly got the idea of kidnapping us, though I was the only one handy enough to drag off to her 1950 Jetback Buick. Each one had a hold on an arm and pulled me toward the street.
Quite a ruckus developed after that. Neighbors came out to watch. Neighbor kid Larry Sundstrom, who lived in one of our rentals, on orders from Willene ran out and got in front of the car to write down mom's license plate number. People were yelling and gesticulating wildly. He got the plate numbers (he was mildly retarded) and fled, and then mom drove off. They took me to a fancy shopping mall in Irvine to get me proper clothes for the weekend (I had only been wearing a T-shirt and shorts when they nabbed me). We spent the weekend at a couple of pools, as the pictures above indicate.
Mom was living in an apartment complex at the time in Downey, CA, on La Reina, in a studio, at the top and to the left of the stairs in the upper photograph. I slept on the floor, on a lamb skin rug. When the weekend finally came to a close and mom dropped me off at the triplex, dad suggested that I apologize to Willene, who was in the kitchen. I did so but without much conviction. They were having a barbecue with people I did not even know.
When we were clearing out mom's things from her apartment in San Pedro, CA, to move her to an assisted living residence several blocks away, I came across a legal document that made me curious. Dad apparently took out a court order against mom for the above incident. The main complaint was that mom did not inform him that she wanted to take us kids that day. She was required to give 24 hours' notice but had not. Mom agreed to the provisions of dad's complaint. She might have swallowed at bit of crow, but she subsequently was able to take us kids for a weekend as long as she notified dad of that in advance. I only recently learned from our Aunt Jean that Grandma Breeze was afraid that whole weekend that the cops would show up and take me away. But looking at the document, dad apparently claims he did not even know where mom lived at the time, so he could not have contacted the police to have me picked up.
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