I
had just completed kindergarten in 1958 when I came down with whooping cough. I remember how funny it sounded, with the involuntary gasp at the end of each cough, but at that age, I had no idea that it could be a life-threatening illness. My mother kept me home for the first six weeks of my summer vacation.

I was too young to feel bored by such confinement, and I found many things to keep me busy. Like hundreds of thousands of kids across the country, I was singing along with “The Purple People Eater,” Sheb Wooley’s novelty hit, which climbed the music charts that summer. Wham-O had just introduced its fabled Hula Hoop for a mere $1.98, and I spent much of that season perfecting my gyrations to keep one orbiting my young hips. These hallmarks of 1950s pop culture provided a perfect distraction for a 5-year-old boy, blinding me to the masculine storm front that was fast approaching my event horizon. I lacked the perspective to see that my mother was looking for a new husband, and as the heat of that high-desert summer engulfed us, I was oblivious to the fact that Hal Lyman was about to become my stepfather.

Hal worked as a mechanic at North American Aviation, and met my mother there early that year. He was 43 years old; she was 37. He may have been blue collar, but he knew how to present himself. He projected an image of the hardworking and practical provider, just what my mother had in mind. One of the few photographs I have of Hal before their marriage shows him behind the wheel of his white Austin-Healy convertible. He was in his mid-30s then, smoking a pipe and sporting a full head of wavy hair that had given way to a crew cut by the time I knew him. He looked like quite the carefree bachelor.

My first clear memory of Hal came the week after they returned from Las Vegas late that summer, newly married. He was building a house in the nearby community of Quartz Hill, and my mother and I moved in with him. I remember riding with him in his sports car one warm summer night as he and my mother were completing the move. I had never ridden in a convertible before, and although the night was still warm, I fussed about the wind whipping through my hair. He pulled the car to the side of the road, and snapped the canvas cover across the passenger seat, telling me to crouch down in the footwell. Riding there in that warm cubbyhole, I could hear the rush of the wind and the hum of the motor as he shifted gears. He was listening to Vin Scully on the car radio, announcing a Dodgers game. The team had just moved to Los Angeles earlier that year, bringing their announcer with them.

Those first few weeks in Hal’s almost-finished home provided a rich opportunity to get acquainted. If I had been a bit older and capable of negotiating and setting boundaries, things might have been much different between my new stepfather and me. Neither of us knew quite what to make of the other, and we got off on the wrong foot.

One morning a few days, after my mother and I had begun to settle in, my stepfather opened the kitchen cupboard and found 19 boxes of different breakfast cereals, all of them opened and partially eaten.

“What’s all this?” he asked my mother. “Why so many boxes of cereal?”

“Oh, most of them had toys or little prizes that Ronnie wanted.”

My stepfather rolled his eyes in disbelief. Not wanting to bicker with his new bride, he said nothing, but over the course of the next month, he consumed all the cereal in those boxes.

This incident said a lot about the different ideas she and my new stepfather had about childrearing. Most parents in the 1950s fell into two main camps; permissive or authoritarian. It didn’t take me long to realize that I now had one parent from each of these camps.

My mother was overindulgent. I was her only child, and giving me everything I asked for just seemed her way of expressing her love for me. Of course, in many instances it also saved her from having to set limits—her answer was almost always yes.

My stepfather viewed her permissiveness as undue coddling, plain and simple. He often said that I had too many toys, and that I needed to take more responsibility around the house. He had rigid ideas about early bedtimes, the frequency of haircuts, and the delegation of chores. I seldom lived up to his expectations. To hear the demanding tone he used with me, one might assume he spanked me often, but my mother forbade him to lay a hand on me. I have come to wonder if her injunction might have fueled the sharpness of his psychological “swats,” for I found him to be a harsh disciplinarian.

I was too young to have seen my family situation in terms of the differences in my parents’ basic temperaments. My mother’s entire family had been open, warm and affectionate. Hal, like most of the other members of his family, was stiff and undemonstrative.

If I had been his own son, he might have been more affectionate and accepting. If the two of them had lived together for a few years before I was born, their parenting styles might have blended together into something less polarizing. As it was, by the time they married, my mother’s laissez-faire approach was already well established. Because she had been hurt by the disappointments in her own life, she seemed to devote herself to protecting me from every problem, both real and imagined. This ranged from the disappointment of not getting toys I wanted, to the ordeal of eating foods I did not like.

Hal did not have a good sense of humor, and he did not suffer lightly the fools who made the mistake of playing jokes on him. I remember that the summer after we moved into his home, my mother played a practical joke on him as he lay napping one afternoon on our patio. He had fallen asleep in the hammock beside her while she painted her fingernails. When she finished, noticing that he was fast asleep, she painted his toenails bright red. She told me later that it was all she could do to keep from laughing out loud as she brushed the polish onto each toenail, and she had left him there to discover the joke alone.

When he woke up and noticed the red polish on his toenails, he went out to his workshop behind the house, and removed it. She had thought he might find her joke funny, but he just got mad. His gruff reaction had left her with the feeling that he was just a grouchy old bear, and even years later, she continued to say that he used sandpaper to grate the polish off his nails.

My relationship with Hal seemed strained from the outset, and it never recovered or improved. He seemed so clumsy in dealing with me. He showed no forbearance for the foibles and fantasies of childhood, nor tolerance for the make-believe of an imaginative boy. I sometimes wonder if he might have been less abrasive and more affectionate if he had known me as a newborn, feeding me a bottle, cradling me in his arms, changing my diaper. He was always so stiff and tense around kids in general, and even having me in his home day after day didn’t seem to soften his brittleness.

Hal’s tastes were decidedly lowbrow. He came home from work expecting meat and potatoes on the table, and he spent his evenings in his recliner chair as a procession of Westerns flashed across our TV screen in vintage black and white: “Have Gun Will Travel,” “Maverick,” “The Rebel,” “Gunsmoke,” “Rawhide.” He was an avid fan of TV wrestling matches, announced—“whoa, Nellie!”—by Dick Lane. Hal’s enthusiastic outcries often punctuated the house as he watched the wrestling matches. The silliness of these staged bouts quickly wore thin on me, and I began retiring to my bedroom to read, or to listen to records, or to keep my Crayola marks “inside the lines” of my coloring book pages.

My bedtime was 9 p.m. My mother read me bedtime stories every night from my collection of Little Golden Books. I suffered from nighttime leg aches, and she sometimes would massage them with rubbing alcohol as I lay in my bed. Her presence was reassuring, and I pleaded with her to linger. I hated being put to bed while they were still up, and even after lights out, I often tried to stay awake in bed, listening to the TV in the other room.

I usually would fall asleep by the time the two of them switched off the TV. It was then that my stepfather often would step quietly into my bedroom with the biggest flashlight I had ever seen, shining it directly in my face to see if I squinted or blinked. His brusque manner in doing this may have stemmed from his own shyness. I think he wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to hear him making love to my mother, but that didn’t change my sense of boundary violation. As with so many things my stepfather did, I found his actions heavy-handed and sometimes rude, but I was far too intimidated to object.

This behavior with the flashlight captured something about Hal’s basic personality. He had very strict ideas about what he considered proper behavior, and in many ways he behaved as though he thought himself above the law, or at least an active agent of its enforcement. He served in the Sheriff’s Reserve for several years, and kept registered firearms in the house. At regular intervals, he visited the firing range to test his marksmanship. The policeman’s image suited his autocratic demeanor and his ramrod-stiff carriage.

He was the dominant male authority figure in my young life. I yearned for his approval, and this invested his disapproving remarks with far more power than they otherwise would have held—power to wound, power to put me in a cold sweat at the sound of his voice or a snap of his fingers when he was angry. I was afraid of making him mad, and I soon grew to hate him.