Our Teens Rebel And Leave Home
From James Donahue’s Journal
Once they were in high school and starting to drive, Aaron, Ayn and Susan began their own style of rebellion that brought about disruption in the home and sometimes the community.
Aaron appeared to be on his good behavior around Doris and me, and was always there to help in the heavy duties like lawn care, cutting wood and keeping machinery running. Unknown to us, however, he was making life miserable for his sisters. He took up a friendship with Don Murray who had an old car that took them into town almost every night. They acquired a large hood ornament that depicted a right human hand with its middle finger up, which they mounted on Murray’s car. They enjoyed driving through town, in a long lineup of other teens that also were cruising the streets, as teens did in those days. Don and Aaron, however, drove excessively slow, holding up a long line of cars. Finally they were stopped by the police and Don was ordered to remove the ornament because it was offending everybody that saw it.
Aaron and Don were responsible for many Halloween pranks that were well remembered. They spent one entire night decorating one boy’s home with toilet paper. The entire house, the trees and all of the shrubs in the yard were covered in the stuff. Aaron was so proud of his handiwork he made sure that Doris and I drove by the house the following morning to see what he and Don had accomplished.
When he worked at the A&P store, Aaron hated the piped-in music that filled the store. He was always sensitive to certain kinds of music and was selective in the records he bought. One night he managed to sabotage the music system so severely that it took weeks before repairs could be made. After that he did it again. As far as I know, the store never figured out how this happened.
Aaron was doing poorly in school, and he was raising Cain with his teachers and the entire school staff. He became a master at practical jokes, many of them downright malicious. I was called to the school one day after a janitor caught Aaron causing damage to the fixtures in a men’s restroom adjoining the school gymnasium. The story was told that Aaron also figured out a way to remove individual lockers from the walls and one night, while the school was open and nobody guarding the hallways, he managed to switch a number of lockers so that those who used them could not find their assigned lockers the following day. He apparently selected some of the boys who had been giving him trouble for this prank. After that, the school installed iron bars at hallway entrances during public events in the gymnasium and cafeteria.
Aaron mastered the voice of Donald Duck. One day he walked into the superintendent’s office, found the office empty, and got his hands on the school public speaker system. He turned it on and began broadcasting messages to the entire school in Donald Duck voice. It wasn’t long before the secretaries and other staffers cornered him. Everyone was laughing so hard it was hard for school officials to do much to punish Aaron for that prank.
Unfortunately, the teachers in the Sandusky school system failed to recognize the brilliant minds of our children. Aaron excelled only in classic and mechanical arts. He especially liked his art teacher. He was interested in chemistry but the school considered Aaron a dunce and refused to allow him to take the classes he might have excelled in. They tried to steer him into a program for drafting or tool and die making, both taught by the county’s Intermediate School System. Someone from the school called me one day to try to get me to urge Aaron to choose this form of training for a future vocation. He rejected the idea.
Aaron wanted to quit school but we persuaded him to get his diploma. Doris and I had to write some of his term papers and class reports just to get him through. We realized just how marked Aaron was by his teachers when I, a professional writer, could get no better than a D grade for a paper I wrote. Doris got a C on her paper. She has never let me forget the fact that she did better than I did in those school papers.
Once he had his diploma, Aaron took a job at a ladder factory in Croswell. He used the money he earned to buy a Honda motorcycle and took flying lessons at a small private airfield near Croswell. Aaron learned to fly a single engine aircraft, but when he was preparing for his first solo flight, the instructor discovered that Aaron had no sense of direction. Once in the air he had no idea where he was or where he was going. That was the end of his flying lessons.
One day Aaron skidded off a dirt road and crashed his motorcycle in a ditch. Doris and I rushed him to the hospital where he was treated for cuts and bruises. His helmet cracked and part of the face plate was driven back into his face. It might have broken his nose. The accident did not deter him from his love of motorcycles, however. He saved his money and bought a new BMW motorcycle. After that he drove it to Port Huron and joined the Navy. They tested Aaron and found that he had a very high I.Q. They trained him to be a corpsman and he did most of his duty at a VA Hospital in Long Beach, California.
Ayn’s rebellion came in the form of alcoholism. Her job at the Harvest Haus Restaurant gave her the money to own and maintain an old car that gave her a connection to a social life with other classmates that lived in the fast lane.. She began coming home late and a few times stumbled into the house inebriated. We did all we could to curtail that. We scolded her, tried to find ways of punishing her but the fact that she had a job and was getting decent grades in school made it difficult to take away privileges.
Ayn should have gone to college. She had some money saved and got enrolled at Port Huron Junior College during her senior year. She also applied for a student grant and was waiting for that to be approved. Her class voted to take a cruise on a ship for the senior trip, something still practiced at the time. Ayn had the choice of using her money to go to college or take the trip. She chose the senior trip, which we learned turned out to be a drunken endless party on a ship. Once the vessel left the coast of the United States, the students could get all of the alcohol they wanted because state and federal laws no longer applied. The entire trip turned out to be a disaster. Because of the scandal that followed, it may have been the last senior trip allowed at Sandusky High School.
Instead of going to junior college, Ayn joined the Army. Her student grant came in a week too late. I took her to Caro to the recruiting office to get signed up. That was a sad day for me. The Army trained her as a computer technician and she did duty in Korea and Germany before coming back to a base in Georgia. She was married and divorced before she left the states. We saw very little of Ayn since she left for the Army. She has since been in and out of a second marriage. She is the mother of three children and currently lives in Florida where she sold cars.
Susan’s rebellion was more direct and severe. She turned to punk rock music and began dressing in wild outfits as if she was joining the punk movement. The problem was that nobody else in town was daring to dress like that so she stood out like a lighted Christmas tree in July. She discovered roller skating at a local rink and got so good at the art of skating she became well known for her skating talents.
Susan and Doris were at constant war in the home. Doris would raid her room and find the rock music recordings and once found a bong, presumably used in smoking marijuana. Because of our Christian belief system, all of this was seized and trashed. The warfare became so intense (mostly when I was away at work or off cutting wood or researching shipwrecks) that Doris felt as if I was taking Susan’s side in these conflicts. I had a problem punishing Susan. She was, by then a grown woman and I really didn’t know how to deal with that. I tried to talk to Susan. It was impossible for me to physically consider assaulting her. I didn’t have many options for dealing with Susan. One day after a fight with Susan, Doris packed her bags and moved in with her mother and Matt.
That was the week I found and bought a larger, three-quarter-ton Ford pickup that would haul larger loads of wood on my trips to and from Port Hope. I drove the truck over to Wayne’s house to show it to him. I used the visit to seek Wayne’s help in resolving the issue between Doris, Susan and me. Doris always idolized Wayne and Wayne always seemed to have a way of fixing things. That day he walked into their mother’s house with a big suitcase and announced that he was also moving in. He made up some crazy story about trouble at home with Ethel. He made such a joke out of it, Doris got the message and agreed to come back home. In the end, I think Doris was more upset with me for buying a truck without talking to her about it than not joining her ongoing war with Susan.
The problems with Susie intensified and one night, after a bitter fight where I did get involved in the shouting, she moved out of the house and didn’t come back. We learned that she had moved in with the Haupt family. George and his son Lanny Haupt had a farming operation just east of Sandusky where they kept horses. They made their money from a fur business. They bought dead animals, skinned them, dried the pelts and sold them to companies that used the skins and furs to make coats, shoes, purses, wallets and other things. After Susie moved in with this family they put her to work in the business. She put up with it for a while because the Haupts lived well and she had the privilege of riding horses in her spare time. But the work of cleaning pelts was a dirty, very smelly process. While she was there, the Haupts kept us informed of Susie’s activities and agreed to allow her to stay there as long as she worked for her keep. After a while, Susie left that place and disappeared for a while.
At about that time, there was a burglary at our house. Someone got in through a basement window and took pots and pans and other things that were difficult to understand. We called the Sheriff’s Department and a detective that lived just down the road from us came to conduct the investigation. In the meantime, I worked through some of my sources and found that Susie had moved into a mobile home with some other teens on a side road near Deckerville. We deducted that it was Susie and her friends who burglarized our house for things she needed to keep house in that trailer.
Also at about that same time, one of the teachers at the high school called to tip me off that he thought Susan was in trouble. He said she was suspected of having stolen one of the school’s cameras. She had been in a photography class and discovered that she really liked photography. She had an artistic eye on everything she shot and she really liked that class. But near the end of the school year Susie checked out a camera that was never returned. The teacher was tipping me off as a favor because school authorities were reporting the theft to the police.
I got in contact with the detective and told him what I knew. Officers raided the motor home and found all of the missing loot, not only from the burglary of our house, but also the missing camera. In the meantime, I supplied the school with an older Roliflex camera I owned but no longer used just to help keep Susie out of too much trouble. The camera she had in her possession also was quietly returned to the school. The detective, the District Judge and the District Court probation officer worked with us to set up a mock trial and punishment designed to frighten Susie back to her senses. It worked, at least for a while. She was given a sentence of probation and had to show up regularly to see the probation officer. She never was formally charged with a crime, however, but she was never told this for several years. That was one of the advantages I had because I knew all of the court and police personnel and worked closely with them every day. They had done both me and Susan a very big favor.
Susan expressed a desire to work with horses and got an opportunity to train at a horse farm in Florida that specialized in breeding, raising and training Arabians. The position didn’t pay well at first, but she would get good training for a possible profession and a place to live. She wanted to do this. We drove her to Florida and set her up in a wreck of a mobile home on the ranch. It seemed sad to be leaving her off at a place so far from home, but she seemed happy at the prospect of being there.
At first I think Susie did well at the ranch. She always was good with animals and especially enjoyed working with horses. But she fell in with a local punk group and started dressing in punk garb again. One day the ranch fired her. They said she did not depict the image the ranch wanted to offer to their clients.
We flew her home. I picked her up at Detroit Metro Airport and was shocked at the way she looked. Her wild clothes were partly hidden by a black leather jacket with a skull and bones painted on the back. Her hair was cut bald in places and what she had left was dyed orange. When she walked in the house Doris took one look at her and broke down in tears.
It was about that time our lives were changing dramatically. Doris had been laid off from her job in Marlette and she landed another job as a medical technologist at Caro. Her mother and Matt had reached a point where they needed someone to watch over them, so we were in the process of moving into the little grandmother house next to them. I was going to commute to Sandusky. We had our house sold, were setting up for an auction, and were about ready to make our move. We were going to squeeze Jennifer in, but there was no room in the little house for Susie.
Aaron, who was still in the Navy and stationed at Long Beach, said he had a place for her to stay with him. We bought her a plane ticket and sent her there.
This is the way our oldest three children left the roost.
From James Donahue’s Journal
Once they were in high school and starting to drive, Aaron, Ayn and Susan began their own style of rebellion that brought about disruption in the home and sometimes the community.
Aaron appeared to be on his good behavior around Doris and me, and was always there to help in the heavy duties like lawn care, cutting wood and keeping machinery running. Unknown to us, however, he was making life miserable for his sisters. He took up a friendship with Don Murray who had an old car that took them into town almost every night. They acquired a large hood ornament that depicted a right human hand with its middle finger up, which they mounted on Murray’s car. They enjoyed driving through town, in a long lineup of other teens that also were cruising the streets, as teens did in those days. Don and Aaron, however, drove excessively slow, holding up a long line of cars. Finally they were stopped by the police and Don was ordered to remove the ornament because it was offending everybody that saw it.
Aaron and Don were responsible for many Halloween pranks that were well remembered. They spent one entire night decorating one boy’s home with toilet paper. The entire house, the trees and all of the shrubs in the yard were covered in the stuff. Aaron was so proud of his handiwork he made sure that Doris and I drove by the house the following morning to see what he and Don had accomplished.
When he worked at the A&P store, Aaron hated the piped-in music that filled the store. He was always sensitive to certain kinds of music and was selective in the records he bought. One night he managed to sabotage the music system so severely that it took weeks before repairs could be made. After that he did it again. As far as I know, the store never figured out how this happened.
Aaron was doing poorly in school, and he was raising Cain with his teachers and the entire school staff. He became a master at practical jokes, many of them downright malicious. I was called to the school one day after a janitor caught Aaron causing damage to the fixtures in a men’s restroom adjoining the school gymnasium. The story was told that Aaron also figured out a way to remove individual lockers from the walls and one night, while the school was open and nobody guarding the hallways, he managed to switch a number of lockers so that those who used them could not find their assigned lockers the following day. He apparently selected some of the boys who had been giving him trouble for this prank. After that, the school installed iron bars at hallway entrances during public events in the gymnasium and cafeteria.
Aaron mastered the voice of Donald Duck. One day he walked into the superintendent’s office, found the office empty, and got his hands on the school public speaker system. He turned it on and began broadcasting messages to the entire school in Donald Duck voice. It wasn’t long before the secretaries and other staffers cornered him. Everyone was laughing so hard it was hard for school officials to do much to punish Aaron for that prank.
Unfortunately, the teachers in the Sandusky school system failed to recognize the brilliant minds of our children. Aaron excelled only in classic and mechanical arts. He especially liked his art teacher. He was interested in chemistry but the school considered Aaron a dunce and refused to allow him to take the classes he might have excelled in. They tried to steer him into a program for drafting or tool and die making, both taught by the county’s Intermediate School System. Someone from the school called me one day to try to get me to urge Aaron to choose this form of training for a future vocation. He rejected the idea.
Aaron wanted to quit school but we persuaded him to get his diploma. Doris and I had to write some of his term papers and class reports just to get him through. We realized just how marked Aaron was by his teachers when I, a professional writer, could get no better than a D grade for a paper I wrote. Doris got a C on her paper. She has never let me forget the fact that she did better than I did in those school papers.
Once he had his diploma, Aaron took a job at a ladder factory in Croswell. He used the money he earned to buy a Honda motorcycle and took flying lessons at a small private airfield near Croswell. Aaron learned to fly a single engine aircraft, but when he was preparing for his first solo flight, the instructor discovered that Aaron had no sense of direction. Once in the air he had no idea where he was or where he was going. That was the end of his flying lessons.
One day Aaron skidded off a dirt road and crashed his motorcycle in a ditch. Doris and I rushed him to the hospital where he was treated for cuts and bruises. His helmet cracked and part of the face plate was driven back into his face. It might have broken his nose. The accident did not deter him from his love of motorcycles, however. He saved his money and bought a new BMW motorcycle. After that he drove it to Port Huron and joined the Navy. They tested Aaron and found that he had a very high I.Q. They trained him to be a corpsman and he did most of his duty at a VA Hospital in Long Beach, California.
Ayn’s rebellion came in the form of alcoholism. Her job at the Harvest Haus Restaurant gave her the money to own and maintain an old car that gave her a connection to a social life with other classmates that lived in the fast lane.. She began coming home late and a few times stumbled into the house inebriated. We did all we could to curtail that. We scolded her, tried to find ways of punishing her but the fact that she had a job and was getting decent grades in school made it difficult to take away privileges.
Ayn should have gone to college. She had some money saved and got enrolled at Port Huron Junior College during her senior year. She also applied for a student grant and was waiting for that to be approved. Her class voted to take a cruise on a ship for the senior trip, something still practiced at the time. Ayn had the choice of using her money to go to college or take the trip. She chose the senior trip, which we learned turned out to be a drunken endless party on a ship. Once the vessel left the coast of the United States, the students could get all of the alcohol they wanted because state and federal laws no longer applied. The entire trip turned out to be a disaster. Because of the scandal that followed, it may have been the last senior trip allowed at Sandusky High School.
Instead of going to junior college, Ayn joined the Army. Her student grant came in a week too late. I took her to Caro to the recruiting office to get signed up. That was a sad day for me. The Army trained her as a computer technician and she did duty in Korea and Germany before coming back to a base in Georgia. She was married and divorced before she left the states. We saw very little of Ayn since she left for the Army. She has since been in and out of a second marriage. She is the mother of three children and currently lives in Florida where she sold cars.
Susan’s rebellion was more direct and severe. She turned to punk rock music and began dressing in wild outfits as if she was joining the punk movement. The problem was that nobody else in town was daring to dress like that so she stood out like a lighted Christmas tree in July. She discovered roller skating at a local rink and got so good at the art of skating she became well known for her skating talents.
Susan and Doris were at constant war in the home. Doris would raid her room and find the rock music recordings and once found a bong, presumably used in smoking marijuana. Because of our Christian belief system, all of this was seized and trashed. The warfare became so intense (mostly when I was away at work or off cutting wood or researching shipwrecks) that Doris felt as if I was taking Susan’s side in these conflicts. I had a problem punishing Susan. She was, by then a grown woman and I really didn’t know how to deal with that. I tried to talk to Susan. It was impossible for me to physically consider assaulting her. I didn’t have many options for dealing with Susan. One day after a fight with Susan, Doris packed her bags and moved in with her mother and Matt.
That was the week I found and bought a larger, three-quarter-ton Ford pickup that would haul larger loads of wood on my trips to and from Port Hope. I drove the truck over to Wayne’s house to show it to him. I used the visit to seek Wayne’s help in resolving the issue between Doris, Susan and me. Doris always idolized Wayne and Wayne always seemed to have a way of fixing things. That day he walked into their mother’s house with a big suitcase and announced that he was also moving in. He made up some crazy story about trouble at home with Ethel. He made such a joke out of it, Doris got the message and agreed to come back home. In the end, I think Doris was more upset with me for buying a truck without talking to her about it than not joining her ongoing war with Susan.
The problems with Susie intensified and one night, after a bitter fight where I did get involved in the shouting, she moved out of the house and didn’t come back. We learned that she had moved in with the Haupt family. George and his son Lanny Haupt had a farming operation just east of Sandusky where they kept horses. They made their money from a fur business. They bought dead animals, skinned them, dried the pelts and sold them to companies that used the skins and furs to make coats, shoes, purses, wallets and other things. After Susie moved in with this family they put her to work in the business. She put up with it for a while because the Haupts lived well and she had the privilege of riding horses in her spare time. But the work of cleaning pelts was a dirty, very smelly process. While she was there, the Haupts kept us informed of Susie’s activities and agreed to allow her to stay there as long as she worked for her keep. After a while, Susie left that place and disappeared for a while.
At about that time, there was a burglary at our house. Someone got in through a basement window and took pots and pans and other things that were difficult to understand. We called the Sheriff’s Department and a detective that lived just down the road from us came to conduct the investigation. In the meantime, I worked through some of my sources and found that Susie had moved into a mobile home with some other teens on a side road near Deckerville. We deducted that it was Susie and her friends who burglarized our house for things she needed to keep house in that trailer.
Also at about that same time, one of the teachers at the high school called to tip me off that he thought Susan was in trouble. He said she was suspected of having stolen one of the school’s cameras. She had been in a photography class and discovered that she really liked photography. She had an artistic eye on everything she shot and she really liked that class. But near the end of the school year Susie checked out a camera that was never returned. The teacher was tipping me off as a favor because school authorities were reporting the theft to the police.
I got in contact with the detective and told him what I knew. Officers raided the motor home and found all of the missing loot, not only from the burglary of our house, but also the missing camera. In the meantime, I supplied the school with an older Roliflex camera I owned but no longer used just to help keep Susie out of too much trouble. The camera she had in her possession also was quietly returned to the school. The detective, the District Judge and the District Court probation officer worked with us to set up a mock trial and punishment designed to frighten Susie back to her senses. It worked, at least for a while. She was given a sentence of probation and had to show up regularly to see the probation officer. She never was formally charged with a crime, however, but she was never told this for several years. That was one of the advantages I had because I knew all of the court and police personnel and worked closely with them every day. They had done both me and Susan a very big favor.
Susan expressed a desire to work with horses and got an opportunity to train at a horse farm in Florida that specialized in breeding, raising and training Arabians. The position didn’t pay well at first, but she would get good training for a possible profession and a place to live. She wanted to do this. We drove her to Florida and set her up in a wreck of a mobile home on the ranch. It seemed sad to be leaving her off at a place so far from home, but she seemed happy at the prospect of being there.
At first I think Susie did well at the ranch. She always was good with animals and especially enjoyed working with horses. But she fell in with a local punk group and started dressing in punk garb again. One day the ranch fired her. They said she did not depict the image the ranch wanted to offer to their clients.
We flew her home. I picked her up at Detroit Metro Airport and was shocked at the way she looked. Her wild clothes were partly hidden by a black leather jacket with a skull and bones painted on the back. Her hair was cut bald in places and what she had left was dyed orange. When she walked in the house Doris took one look at her and broke down in tears.
It was about that time our lives were changing dramatically. Doris had been laid off from her job in Marlette and she landed another job as a medical technologist at Caro. Her mother and Matt had reached a point where they needed someone to watch over them, so we were in the process of moving into the little grandmother house next to them. I was going to commute to Sandusky. We had our house sold, were setting up for an auction, and were about ready to make our move. We were going to squeeze Jennifer in, but there was no room in the little house for Susie.
Aaron, who was still in the Navy and stationed at Long Beach, said he had a place for her to stay with him. We bought her a plane ticket and sent her there.
This is the way our oldest three children left the roost.