Derailed: A Memoir

By Jerry Tanner

Derailed is the saga of a highly successful businessman brought down by mere allegations of misconduct, his subsequent confrontation with an American legal system that categorically denied him a fair trial.

A natural entrepreneur, Jerry started a $20 million dollar health care company from scratch, then took over a corrupt, bankrupt mail order pharmacy and within one year turned it into a $30 million dollar company. And all of that would have been just the beginning.

But when Jerry found himself entangled in a legal battle over allegations of sexual assault brought by the sons of an evangelical pastor in one of the cradles of the religious right, it all came crashing down. As a gay man highly successful in business, Jerry did not fit the moralist model of the prevailing community. In short, he wasnt supposed to be successful.

This book details Jerrys early life, the rapid rise of his successful healthcare companies, and the fall that came with the criminal indictment.

Derailed is a powerful commentary on the hypocrisy of an American society founded on the principles of equality and tolerance, yet steeped in institutionalized prejudice, and a stinging indictment of our system of courts and jurisprudence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Dec 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452543116

Jerry Tanner

Jerry Tanner is the founder of two health-care companies that attained combined gross revenues of $50 million. Today Jerry is an author and radio personality and host of the regularly scheduled program “Are You Derailed?” on WebTalkRadio with six million listeners, fighting for universal human rights and equality for all Americans. He advocates for legal reforms in America’s criminal justice system.

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Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter One

The Fire

I’ve always been a man of contradictions. I have, for example, grown insightful with age and ludicrously unaware at the same time. I moon over details and nuances others don’t see, and yet miss the note of lost promise in a lover’s voice. I fondly remember the house where I grew up and seconds later feel my throat tighten as I recall watching the same old farm house burn to the ground more than thirty-two years ago.

The house was built by old man Price back in the 1870s. In addition to the house, he put up a massive barn, the stalls elegantly crafted with local oak and mahogany and alder. Each stall had steel bars spanning the top half of the wall and five brass stars over each door and a brass side lock that shifted into place with a resounding clank. Out behind the barn was a mile-long dirt racetrack that Price put to good use living out his sole passions: horse racing and gambling. Price was a wealthy man in his day and not ashamed that others should know it. The front door of the house was large with an oval insert of cut glass rimmed in gold. Behind the door was a tall foyer and beyond that a living room and parlor and dining room and a servant’s quarters off the kitchen. Sixteen foot ceilings and lots of hardwood floors throughout. The old house even had a library lined with bookshelves made of dark wood, the wood heavily varnished and shiny with age. The sitting room had an improbably large bay window and a built-in bench seat where you could waste an entire afternoon gazing out on the front yard and the tree-lined street.

The yard had an apple tree, a peach tree, and a cherry tree next to a grape grove gone to seed where tenacious grapes grew wild in tightly packed purple clumps. In season Mom lugged an old wooden basket and a knife out into the field and cleaved herself a basketful of grapes to make jam. After old man Price passed, the property landed squarely in his son’s lap and the son, a big falsely-toothed man, lost the place to unpaid taxes in the 1930s. For years the house sat empty and the flowerbeds of bloodroot and Solomon’s seal and squirrel corn died off and weeds wriggled in to take their place. At the end of World War I, my great-grandfather, Neil Tanner, scooped up the whole kit and caboodle for sixteen hundred dollars. He got the forty acres, house, barn and horse stalls, and a sort of garage with a live-in unit above for the hired help.

By the time the house was shuffled off to my parents, it was long past its glory days. My parents were hardworking Ohioans, the kind of people perpetually struggling to move up a rung or two and never quite getting a foothold. Both worked long hours and double shifts when they could get them. Mom worked second shift at the Meyers Company and dad worked third shift at Abbott Laboratories roaming the plant patching together broken machines lickety-split. There was a gap in their schedules and because I was sixteen, it was my job look after my eleven year old sister, Tammy, and four year old baby brother, Clifford.

On a Tuesday in October Mom and Dad were off at work and I fell asleep on the couch downstairs. I woke and coughed and shook my head. I rubbed at my eyes with both hands. Smoke and a fusty stink filled my nose and mouth and I instinctively held my breath. When I couldn’t hold it any longer, I took in giant gasps of dense blue-gray air. The room was foggy with swirling, cottony smoke. I slid off the couch, pulled my shirt over my mouth, and crawled to the hall where the thick air was even more menacing. The kitchen doorway I could see at one end of the hallway and beyond the door flashes of orange light and angry flames clawing their way from the kitchen into the hall. I reached up and grabbed the phone that sat on a narrow table in the foyer and I called the fire department. I waited as it rang and rang and rang. In the 1970s there was no nine-one-one, at least not in our town, no at the ready dispatcher, and no firehouse full of restless firemen repacking hose and polishing big red and generally clambering to save a sleepy teen and his little sister and brother from a kitchen fire.

The Polk fire department was all-volunteer, which often meant no one was at the firehouse at all. I dialed the operator and a cheery woman’s voice asked how she could help. I screamed at her that the hallway and living room and parlor were filled with smoke. I shouted for help and rambled and coughed and told her to hurry without giving an address or my name. I glimpsed the fire lurching its way from the kitchen into the hall and blackening one wall. I dropped the phone and sprinted up the narrow wooden stairs into Tammy’s room and shouted that the house was on fire. I grabbed her wrist, yanked her out of the room, and tugged her down the hall to Clifford’s door. I kicked the door open and ran in and hoisted all twenty pounds of him over my shoulders. Tammy stood staring down the stairwell at the angry fire, crying, looking from me to the fire as if I could explain what was happening in a way that was less terrifying. I grabbed her wrist and she screamed at me words I didn’t hear.

The flames were bright and hot and unwavering in their pursuit of us as if chasing us up the stairs and wherever we went they quickly followed. The stair treads were ancient mahogany and heavily varnished and flammable as a match head. Spiteful red and yellow flames licked at the first step and it exploded in a series of rapid and deafening cracks. The stairway was a no-go. I panicked. I hauled Clifford, now shouting at me and hitting me in the chest to let him down, into my parents’ darkened bedroom at the front of our house.

Smoke billowed in eddies at our legs and then higher and I held my breath as long as I could and then took in lungfuls of silty ash. From one of the bedroom windows, a slick slate roof sloped steeply forward. I put Clifford on the floor near the window. Here, I said pulling his tee shirt up over his mouth and nose, Breathe! Tammy was next to me shaking uncontrollably, and in the moonlight I could see tears streaming down her face. Don’t move, I said. I mean it! Don’t move!

I tugged on the window, but it refused to give. Without thinking, I kicked out two of the lower panes and a wave of heat and smoke hit me in the back and rushed past me out the window. I put one foot out the window trying not to cut my leg or hands on the jagged glass. My toe touched the cool slate and I shifted my butt over the window sill and put all my weight on my left foot and leg. Clifford scooted closer to the window and scrunched down on the floor, his face hidden behind the tee shirt. At one point I couldn’t see him and I screamed his name over and over until he raised his hand above the level of the window sill. Tammy stood there in the blackness frozen, paralyzed with fear or shock or whatever, and squinted at me, as if I was miles away, her hand over her mouth and nose. I pulled my other leg over the sill and adjusted my feet to the slope of the roof. I bent forward with my face in the open window and gusts of hot air hit me in the eyes and throat and deep in my nose. Pain shot through the center of my forehead and I pushed at the flat space between my eyes and shouted for Clifford.

The air in the room was nearly opaque and I could barely make out Tammy’s thin body standing not two feet from the window. She looked small and smothered as if she were drowning standing up. No one shouted back. The fire was on the second floor. I couldn’t see it, but I could hear it, loud, impersonating thunder as it ate away at the old farmhouse. I shouted and held my breath and bent forward again and this time I lost my footing and went to one knee. I grabbed at the slate and the rusting wires that held the slate in place and I slid face down, feet first away from the window. I clawed at the roof and made crawling motions with my legs resisting the pull of gravity. And then I felt nothing at all.

I fell a thousand feet in my mind. In the air, I screamed and looked skyward and screamed some more and counted the seconds until I hit the ground. The counting took forever and nothing flashed before my eyes. No reliving of my sixteen years. No odd and wondrous moments with family and friends. Just the counting. I hit and the counting stopped. My body was filled with adrenaline and when I landed I bounced upright like a life-sized toy Gumby without so much as a scratch or a pain. I ran back from the house so I could see the window and I shouted at Clifford and Tammy in long raspy breaths. No one responded. My buddy Bart was already there in the street watching the flames and me shouting and there were others, but it was Bart I wanted to get through to. I screamed at him that Clifford and Tammy were in the house. Upstairs. There in the window. I sprinted to the front door and it was locked. I banged on the door and the cut glass and kicked and pounded as if I was diligent enough someone would politely let me inside to retrieve my baby sister and brother before the flames swallowed up the house. More neighbors showed up and Cindy Bratton’s father, a hulking man with thick fingers, tugged on my arm and said things to me I didn’t hear. Mrs. Bratton begged me to come away from the house and the fire chief arrived and behind him the sheriff who finally pulled me from the porch and handed me over to the Bratton’s who took me to their home and stood watch over me.

When my mother arrived home that evening, tired and worn-out from a double shift, she saw the lights and sirens and all the smoke rising from her family home. She didn’t see her children. She ran in circles asking the firemen and neighbors and the police about little Clifford and Tammy and Jerry. Most only shrugged. Others who knew or suspected what had happened refused to say. Eventually some brave soul, told her that I was fine, that Clifford and Tammy were still inside. That’s when Mom went weak-kneed and collapsed.

One of the police put in a call to the sheriff’s department who called my dad at Abbot Labs. A deputy drove out to the plant and picked him up and brought him back to the house where he comforted Mom. The two of them stood there in the dark watching the firemen go on about their business for several hours. They never came for me, never called or sent a note.

For those wearisome hours life moved in slow motion. I felt more insubstantial with each ticking second. I couldn’t sit. I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t think. I paced back and forth on the Bratton’s musty wool rug near the front window looking out into the dark. Mr. Bratton called the doctor. Doc, I got a boy here bouncing off the walls. Can you come give him something, anything to slow him down some. The doctor arrived and shot me in the arm. I don’t remember a thing after that. The following day, October 20, 1976, the front page of Ashland Times Gazette ran a half page photo of glum men in stained overalls carrying my brother and sister out the front door of our house in two shiny black body bags.

Chapter Two

Suicide

Mom and Dad first met when Mom was attending Mapleton High outside of Ashland, Ohio. He was twenty one. She was sixteen. They met through mutual friends and began dating on the sly. Dad’s extra five years put a kink in the courtship, and as a workaround Mom’s friend, Sherry Jenkins, worked her magic, covering for Mom when she slipped out at night for an evening meet-up with Dad. Mom and Dad didn’t believe in long engagements, so they married six months later on April 2, 1961. I was born not long after on July 27.

After I was born, Mom got pregnant again right away with James Tanner. James died of pneumonia two weeks after he was born. A year and a half later she was pregnant with her third, this time a girl, Diane Renee Tanner. Diane was five months old when Mom and Dad woke up and found her dead in her crib. Before she got out of her teens, Mom had birthed three children and lost two. Those were difficult years, yet she toughed it out, mostly with the help of a close group of girlfriends. After the marriage, Mom took up with Emily Forsythe and Maggie Potter. Emily lived down the street with her three brats and Wayne, the hubby, who worked with Dad at Abbott Labs. Maggie lived up the street with her five boys, all of them buzz-cut and jowly. Mom, Maggie, and Emily were an inseparable team.

Money was tight and as a kid I remember those three trudging into our kitchen, each with an armload of food in Tupperware containers and tin foiled casserole dishes and sacks of canned goods intent on concocting one of their famous anything-goes dinners. The name for this mystery meal was schloop. Think stew made from items you yank blindly from the cupboard, open, and dump into a large pot with only the slightest regard for how the outcome might taste. The idea was to feed three large families all at once and on the cheap. You brought anything in the fridge or the pantry or wherever it was you kept the food and plunked it on our kitchen table. One of them, Maggie most often with her muscled arms and contagious scowl, shoved items into categories based on a logic I never understood, and each category took up a corner of the table. Occasionally one or two particularly questionable items were left in the middle of the table to be trashed or used another day.

Mom and Emily had the challenge of deciding just how to use the ingredients, in what quantities, and in what combinations, to create tonight’s schloop. Put us all together and there were nine kids, zany as a room full of chimps, three moms, and only occasionally a hungry husband wolfing down the night’s schloop. For all I knew every street had its team of mother-chefs fabricating a tasty vat of schloop three or four nights a week. Far from minding, I enjoyed the variety and the surprise. No telling what you’d find in your bowl on schloop night.

At some point in my growing up, I got the distinct impression we were poor. We didn’t drive new cars like some of the other families on the block. Our house was run down and furnished with left-behinds. Once a year Ashland had clean up day and I remember Mom and Emily and Maggie heading over to Hillside, a wealthier part of town where the residents spoke with unneeded correctness, and these three sorted through all the junk and boxes and furniture left out by the curb. They’d pick through mountains of inventory and return victorious with a car full of spanky new objects and get to work finding just the right home for each item. After a day filching throw-aways from the cross-towners, they would go out drinking and dancing and some unlucky neighbor not invited to the party would get the job of watching all us kids. Occasionally, we’d all get to join in. All nine kids and three moms crammed into our old Pontiac and drove out to the Dairy Dolly for a root beer and a cone. As for clothes, we shopped at the Goodwill. I got new, occasionally, but it wasn’t often. I wore canvas tennis shoes in gym class when everyone else was sporting Nikes or Adidas. Someday, it would be different, I told myself. Someday I’d be well, not poor. As a kid I couldn’t get my head around rich, but I had a clear understanding of poor and I knew I could do better.

The first house I remember was on West Tenth Street in Ashland. Mom and Dad saved up enough to plop down a few hundred on an eight thousand dollar two story. To a kid the place felt like an acre of creaky hardwood floors with narrow steps leading to a balcony that overlooked the entry. Mom had a wash room in the basement and an old Maytag wringer washer that sat down there in the corner. The washer was white and boxy with a clunky motor under the tub and all of it supported by four spindly legs on squeaky rollers. I loved wash day and Mom and I would clomp down the stairs to the basement where I’d lay on the piles of dirty clothes while she sorted and washed and ran each piece of clothing through the black rubber cylinders to wring out the excess water. Then I’d have to help her haul the wet laundry upstairs so she could hang everything on the clothesline outside to dry in the warm Ohio sunshine.

When I was six, our small town of Ashland flooded in a big way. A freaky storm muscled its courage over Lake Erie and when it was good and ready it barreled south, aiming for the Ohio shore. I remember the winds, rain, and blinding lightning. For eight solid hours black clouds filled with Zeppelin-sized water balloons dumped rain on Norwalk north of us, Ashland smack in the middle of the storm, and nearby Wooster south and east. One of the many dams surrounding town tried to keep us safe but failed. The dam broke and turned Ashland into a giant lake. We had flooding, hundred mile an hour winds, tornadoes twirling around lifting entire homes off their foundations, and lightning randomly zapping an old oak or tin-roofed house or a farmer too stubborn to pull the tractor into the barn. More than ten thousand homes were damaged and ours was one of them.

One wall in our basement collapsed. My folks didn’t have the money to fix it, so Dad and I braced the wall with two-by-fours and for years we worried that one side of the house might eventually come tumbling down. The house was ancient and I remember that first Christmas after the flood going down into the basement to discover snow had blown in through the cracks in the wall and the sashes of the uneven windows. Once again, we stuffed the holes with wood and old clothes and duct tape and anything we had on hand that might fend off a total collapse for a bit longer. Each year we had snow drifting in from new gaps in the wall and we filled each fissure and went on about our business of living in a home slowly crumbling beneath us.

Life as a kid in northern Ohio was a good as it got and the only odd event I recall, (this was before the fire), was an argument between my dad’s mother, Donna Tanner, and my mom. Granny Tanner had a round face and fuzzy hair and deep lines angling down from the corners of her mouth. She had her own opinions about how I should be raised and to prove it she petitioned the court to allow her to legally snatch me away from my parents. Her argument was that her son and daughter-in-law were too young to take care of a boy like me. That, and Granny Tanner and my grandfather, an engineer for Penn Central Railroad, had money and Mom and Dad didn’t. Granny Tanner was a molder of young minds and she wanted to mold mine before it got all mucked up with whatever nonsense my parents were filling it with. I was seven at the time, and the entire episode didn’t have much of an impact on me, though in hindsight it probably should have.

On my grandmother’s day in court, I stood there in front Judge Muriel Evans. We were in chambers and she asked me a few questions and I answered and she made her ruling and that was that. The judge told Granny Tanner she didn’t have a case. Go on and make peace with your family, she told her, but my grandmother wasn’t big on making peace. Mom and Granny Tanner didn’t speak for some time. Mom was all of twenty-three at the time and to her credit she kept her head. She never prevented me from visiting my grandmother and played the whole thing off as a harebrained family spat.

After the fire everything changed.

My brother and sister were gone, my folks turned inward, and my own thoughts had nowhere to land. I was lost. The old Price homestead in Polk was a pile of black ash. And like it or not, my family, with me in tow, were forced to move in with Granny Tanner. We’d lost everything and with my grandparents at least we had a roof over our heads. This was the late 1970s, almost forty years ago, at a time when people were closer than they are today. To prove it, the manager at the JC Penny store in Ashland, a man I’m not even sure my parents had ever met before, encouraged Mom, Dad, and me to come into the store and shop for suitable clothes to go to the funeral. Other stores and companies did the same—Sears, Colonial, the Red Cross, and a bunch of others I no longer remember—offered all kinds of help, no strings attached.

The day of the funeral, I was numb. I blamed myself and before the service I wanted to say goodbye to Tammy and Clifford in my own way. Without saying a word, I left the house and walked up to Main Street and over to Claremont Street, then south about six blocks to Broad Street where I spotted Heyl’s Funeral Home. I knocked on the door and a man answered. I said I wanted to say goodbye to my sister and brother.

The man made a deep hungh noise. Son, is there anyone with you?

It’s my sister and brother you got in there, I said.

I know who you are. The man seemed earnestly if briefly to consider my request.

The building was bright white and had large densely packed bushes on either side of