Glennon

By Glennon Walker

Glennon Walker has lived a tough life—exciting and busy, but tough. Growing up in Morley, Missouri, with an absent father and a hardworking mother, his siblings got into all sorts of trouble. Later, Walker eventually joined the navy as a minor. After a sexual encounter with a marine, he soon discovers that he’s gay—at first with hesitancy—at a time when homosexuality was a dangerous act. While a first-class petty officer and a gay man, Walker reveals just how difficult military life was in the fifties, regardless of position or rank in life.
With sympathy and honesty, Walker’s autobiography details his life, and what it was like in high school, the US Navy, a partner in crime with his brother, and a man on parole—he spares no detail and tells us just how it is.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RoseDog Books
• Release date: Dec 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9798894997575

Book preview

Chapter 1

Thank you for taking the time to pick up this book and consider reading it, even if you don’t know the author. I can promise you a truthful account of a young boy’s life—bullied in his youth and into early manhood, confused and unprepared for what lay ahead. If you choose to continue reading, I thank you for trusting in the ability of an unproven author to keep you entertained.

I was born on a Morley, Missouri, farm on December 12th, 1936, around eleven o’clock in the evening. It’s interesting to note that my two younger brothers, Melvin, born in 1938, and Gary, born in 1941, were also born in the same house, bed, and corner of the room on their respective birth dates.

The farm, nestled two miles to the west of the small town of Morley, was a picturesque sight. It was owned by a prominent family in the area, and my father, a hardworking man, farmed the land. We were fortunate to live there rent free. The farm, about forty acres in size, was a patchwork of green where corn, soybeans, watermelons, and cantaloupes thrived. As a young boy, I was always on the move, exploring the forty acres of farmland, running through the rows of corn in the summer, and following my mom around the farm as she did her chores: milking the cows, feeding the pigs, and caring for other farm animals.

My favorite time was when Mom picked up two buckets, one with water and the other empty, and we headed for the barn to milk the cows. That triggered our many cats to join the two of us and head for the barn. My mom washed the teats, sat on a small stool, and began to milk the cows, occasionally spraying me and the cats with milk as I giggled, and the cats enjoyed the meal. Mom would set the milk aside until the cream rose to the top, skimmed off, and put it into a wooden churn to make butter. The churning responsibilities would be taken on by my two older sisters, Lora and Dorothy, who were born in 1931 and 1933, respectively.

I also have an older brother, Morris Junior, who was born in 1929.

My name, Glennon, has a unique origin. My mother named me after a moonshiner’s son. This moonshiner, a friend of my grandpa Walker, was a single parent with two boys named Glennon and Bruce. In the early 1930s, he visited my grandpa’s farm while fleeing revenuers. In desperation, he asked my grandpa and granny if they would care for his two sons while he was avoiding the revenuers. My grandparents agreed.

The barn lot had a large water trough for the animals to use. During the hot summer days, the older kids used to cool off by jumping into the trough. One day, my siblings (Junior, Lora, Dorothy, and Mel) and I were in the trough when Lora noticed that Mel was at the bottom and appeared to be limp. Junior quickly pulled him out and laid him over the wooden top part of the fence. Junior then slapped Mel’s back until he spit up water. Mom didn’t find out about this incident until we were grown, and Junior often said that he was afraid she would be mad at him since he was the oldest.

During hot summer days, we survived several tornadoes by rushing to our storm cellar when the clouds looked threatening. Once, while we were all in the storm cellar, we realized that my younger brother was missing. Junior had to go back into the house quickly to find him. Fortunately, we all made it through safely, along with the animals, the house, the barn, and other outbuildings.

We did not have indoor plumbing. Our toilet was located a short distance from the house—it was a small wooden structure built over a deep hole in the ground with only one toilet seat. Sometimes, our toilet paper consisted of pages from an old Sears Roebuck catalogue.

On laundry day, my mom used a large, black cast iron cauldron over a fire pit in the backyard. She would prepare the fire, fill the cauldron with water, add lye soap shavings, and boil the water. Then, she stirred the clothes in the cauldron with a large wooden ladle. Afterward, she rinsed the clothes with clean water and hung them on outdoor clotheslines to dry. Lastly, she ironed the clothes using individual cast irons heated on the kitchen stove, switching the handle from iron to iron as they became hot and ready.

Our family garden was located just beside the house and tended to by my mother, who plowed and planted the vegetables. One day, she told me never to kill a ladybug. She explained that ladybugs help by eating the other insects that destroy the garden.

Some Sundays, our evening meal was exceptional, and we had chicken. Have you ever seen a woman catch a chicken, hold it by its neck, and wring its head off? Mom did, many times. That’s just how we lived. When we had cake, Dad would make us kids start from the bottom so that we could save the icing for last.

When I was six years old, my family moved to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where I started attending school. My oldest sister, Lora, would walk me to school and ensure I met up with her to return home.

We were at breakfast one morning, and my sister, Lora, walked past this tall tin container I was using as a chair and received a huge gash on her upper left leg. When it first happened, blood gushed all over the floor. As my dad was a truck driver and was gone most of the time, my mom hurriedly got assistance from our neighbors and brought her to the hospital.

I have not been able to forget the reason I got banned from the pharmacy up the street. Sadly, when I was young, I used to take things that didn’t belong to me. One time, I accidentally walked out of the store with a small package of Ex-Lax, a chocolate laxative, stuck to my hand. My mom discovered it after I fell ill, and we had to go back to the store. I had to apologize to the store manager, and my mom warned him to make me leave if he ever saw me there again.

During the year we lived there, a tornado hit the area, and just one block from our house, the entire street was leveled, and many people lost their lives.

When I was seven years old, my family moved to Eldorado, Illinois. Life in this small town was calm during the war years, and I often enjoyed activities such as watching movies, fishing, and spending time with my best friend, Dickie Moore. His family owned a dry cleaning business across the street and also had a cabin on a lake named Big Lake, not too far from the city. Dickie’s dad, whose nickname was Pick or Pickle, used to take us bluegill fishing and taught us how to safely paddle a boat. His mom’s name was Millie.

It was strange for me when sirens would sound. Everyone would turn off all lights and close window shades as part of an air raid drill. This happened in our little town where people were afraid of potential bombing by Germans or Japanese. The older folks took it very seriously. Dickie’s older brother was killed in the war, and he showed me foreign coins and paper money his brother had sent him.

There was a murder just up the hill from our house in a wooded area. This young woman and her boyfriend evidently had some problems, and he cut her head off. For a small town, this was a big story. It was the topic of conversation for many months. My sister went to her wake. Why? She didn’t even know her. Suppose it was just something to do.

My older brother took me to a swimming pond he knew about in the middle of a vast acreage owned by Purina Farms. As we were getting undressed to swim, we heard a crack from a rifle and then the whiz of a bullet passing just a few feet above our heads. My brother quickly grabbed my hand and almost dragged me across the field. We decided to go to another swimming pond just up the road, got undressed, left our clothes on the ground, and went in for a swim. Unfortunately, this was also in the middle of someone else’s land, and one of their cows took a liking to my sweat-soaked t-shirt and either ate it or carried it off while chewing on it. So, we had to tell my mom that a cow had eaten it.

We had a vacant room in the house where we stored unused furniture. With so little to do, we kids used the chairs to build a tunnel and fort-like structure. It was our play area during bad weather and in the winter. On one occasion, I noticed my older brother and my sister (who is just older than me) playing around. My sister was wearing a dress with nothing below her waist, and my brother had his pants