Most of us have had some experience in dealing with bullies, either directly as objects of their behavior, or indirectly in perhaps assisting or defending someone else who was the target. The subject has taken on new urgency since the most recent presidential inauguration. It is not that there have never been bullies in or seeking high office. It is that the visibility and violence of such behavior is distinctly obvious under a president who is doing far more to normalize it, as part of his drive for an authoritarian grip on power, than anyone else who has ever occupied the White House.
I mention all this because circumstances have reminded me of the one most potent incident I personally have experienced, which happened way back in 1967. The consequences for me were entirely psychological because I avoided any physical conflict with the individual in question, but his later deeds have always made me wonder about what might have happened and how I dodged a bullet. It is not even that I dwell on the subject. The vast majority of my life has been quite happy without even thinking about it, but I do remember it, and right now I have decided to ponder it in writing.
This is not my first attempt to do so. I am just much better at writing than when I tried more than fifty years ago to craft a short story around the incident. I just did not have the skills at the time to make it work. This time, I am not writing fiction.
Coming from a working-class family in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio—my father was a truck mechanic working at a chemical plant—I needed to save money to attend college. In the two summers between my sophomore and senior years at Brecksville High School, I held a seasonal job at a service plaza on the Ohio Turnpike. I worked as a busboy and dishwasher for Howard Johnson’s, a once-prominent hotel and restaurant chain, whose restaurant business decayed in the late 1990s while a few hotels remain under Wyndham ownership. But in the 1960s, they dominated turnpike franchises in Ohio.
The food, in my humble opinion, was almost always mediocre, served either in a cafeteria with indoor seating or on-the-go from a counter where hot dogs rotated for hours under heat cameras. We ate the food on our meal breaks because there was no alternative in a service plaza setting. Feeding dirty plates and cups into the dishwasher could be a very hot job because the machine was open-ended, with a circular belt carrying dishes in one end and out on the other, where you stacked hot, clean plates and utensils on a metal rack as fast as they emerged from their presumably sterilizing soapy steam bath.
The one factor that made the job enjoyable was working with others. Summer was traveling time, and the turnpike was full of travelers. Aside from some permanent managerial staff, the summer ranks expanded with other high-school (and some college) students needing money just as I did. Most were friendly, pleasant, and humble people. You knew you were working a lowly job if the call came to bring a mop and clean up after some family’s child who got sick and vomited, or if a toilet overflowed in one of the restrooms. If there was one thing I knew then and later with other summer employment, a college education was a ticket to much better opportunities. At the same time, there was an education just in learning to work hard for your money.
Then there was TL. I have never put his name in print before, but he gained his fifteen minutes of fame soon enough. I am using initials because I have no idea at this point whether he is alive, in prison or free, or what became of him. To say that he could be rough-cut and crude was to understate the matter, but as long as he did not bother me, I ignored him. I don’t recall hearing him referred to as a bully, but there is no question he qualified. The problem was that he had a penchant for bothering people in a rather random fashion. Someone else may have understood what set him off. I did not.
But it became my problem one night, working the shift from 3 to 11 p.m. I do not recall what he was supposed to be doing, but aside from the cooks, our jobs were all pretty similar. We moved trays of hot food out to the front line. We mopped, cleaned restrooms, bussed tables, washed dishes. It was all low-wage, low-skill, and highly interchangeable. For reasons I never knew, on that one night, instead of doing his job, I became his priority. At every turn for at least two hours, as I recall, he found an opportunity to challenge me to fight or at least tried to taunt me into reacting so that he could start a fight.
He apparently was like that, but not everyone knew it, nor did I until that night. One long-time high school friend told me perhaps a year ago that, on a school bus in the eighth grade, he was sitting directly in front of TL when, for no apparent reason, TL slugged him in the head from behind. This friend was so bewildered and stunned that he did not know what to do. He did not even think of running up to the bus driver to report it. It is not hard to imagine that TL had already learned that he could get away with such pointless violence without being challenged.
On the evening when he confronted me, however, he seemed to want to antagonize me into reacting, which may have been a tactic that worked in other circumstances and justified starting a fight. I had no such inclination at the time. My sense was that I had a job to do and that he was a distraction, so I went on with my business without acknowledging his taunts. The problem was that the harassment, in my recollection, continued for at least a couple of hours. Exactly what jobs he had been assigned, and how, if at all, they were getting done was not my concern, but clearly the fact that I was ignoring him to the best of my ability was triggering an obsession on his part with getting the reaction he wanted. And so he kept it up.
The thing about a setting like Howard Johnson’s, with swinging doors that let employees in and out of the kitchen into the dining room and cafeteria, is that his actions became increasingly obvious with each attempt that he made. Word of this behavior circulated quickly among the staff and reached the manager, who informed him that he was fired. On the spot, fired. Time to go home and never come back. I learned about it after the manager had confronted him.
The rest of the evening, it was a relief that he was gone, although he was not completely gone at first. The employee parking lot was behind the building. Employees would see the area because it contained a loading dock and dumpsters. They soon noticed that he was hanging out in the parking lot, hoping to reignite the confrontation after the shift was over. Put simply, I am sure he envisioned beating me up in the parking lot before I reached my car to go home. Once it was clear he had not left, the manager called the police to have him removed.
Even that was not the end of his damage. At the end of the shift, when people were willing to make sure I reached my car and drove home safely, I discovered that he had broken into my locker in the dressing room, where we all changed into or out of our uniforms, and had stuffed my street clothes in a toilet. So, I kept my uniform on and wrung out the wet clothes and took them home to add to the laundry. I don’t remember the conversation with my parents about what happened, but I know we discussed it, and they were glad to hear he had been fired.
I really spent little time thinking about him after that because I did not see him. But one day during the school year, our home room learned that he would not be coming back. I am going to state here that, while it may be possible to return to Brecksville, Ohio, to pursue the details of the story through old library microfiche of local newspapers, I am choosing to rely on my own disciplined memory because it is sufficient for the larger point of this blog post. But the story that was related to us was that TL had been shaking down local business owners in Brecksville, and that he had also broken into a house. The woman who lived there had discovered him in the kitchen, and he attacked her with a knife and killed her. He had been arrested for murder. We were all stunned, but we all had our opinions of how matters had reached this point.
Some students noted that the news reports had indicated that his parents had not believed in disciplining him and his brother. They expressed criticism of that philosophy in light of what they considered a dismal outcome, but the teacher, surprisingly for most of us, suggested that we refrain from judgment on that point. There might be many other facts to consider.
But what always stuck in my mind was the impression that no one had stopped this young man in his troubled tracks until it was too late. He had bullied many people, and he had mostly gotten away with it until the consequences became so outrageous that the heavy hand of the justice system had to terminate his freedom.
To be honest, despite some serious internet searches that turned up nothing, I have not chosen not to relentlessly pursue the question of what happened to TL. It is certain in my mind that he finally had to face prosecution, but within the years following his crime, Ohio did not use the death penalty, and he may have received some lenience as a minor if he was not yet eighteen. I just don’t know, and it is beyond the point of this article to spend a lot of time on FOIA searches of old state records to find out. But two things stand out for me to this day.
One, just stated, is that no one seems to have taken seriously the alarming trajectory of this young man’s life until he took another life, at which point, to state it metaphorically, the canoe had gone over the waterfall. I am sure that most of us never heard from or about him again, but a middle-aged wife died a terrifying death in her own home.
The second point is that, by virtue of circumstance and my own instincts about how to react to this troubled individual, I escaped a similar fate. What TL might have done if I had engaged with him inside the restaurant is hard to say, but the purpose of his loitering in the parking lot is not hard to guess. I could easily have ended up in the hospital. Given what happened later, I might also have ended up in a coffin after being killed in the parking lot. Fate blessed me, but it did not save his innocent victim in her own home in Brecksville just a few months later.
Unrestrained bullies are dangerous. TL would never have gained political power, but some bullies with better education and greater privilege manage to do so, and they too are not inclined to stop until the canoe goes over the rapids because of their sense that nothing can stop them. Not even their own common sense.
Jim Schwab
PS: I have chosen to use only two Shutterstock images in this post because, frankly, I have no photos connected to the story. Any photos of the service plaza described taken today would bear almost no resemblance to the building as it existed in the late 1960s. The place has been completely renovated at least once. I have opted for symbolism instead. For the same reason, there are very few hyperlinks.