I Was Never Here

The thought of disappearing without a trace terrified me as a child.  The idea that one could be here one minute and gone the next with no explanation, the notion of abnegation, was deeply unsettling. 

It’s hard to say what brought it on.  It could have been the times.  The 1970s were a heyday for media-hyped serial killers, several of whom were either never identified (such as the Zodiac killer) or evaded capture for years until advances in forensic technology led to the culprit (as with the recently arrested Golden State Killer suspect). 

It was also a time when, with alarming frequency, kids like me would leave for school, or a friend’s house, or on an errand and never return.  The sudden death of a grandmother when I was still a preschooler may also have contributed to my pervasive feeling of unease.  I’m at a loss to explain it now; I just know it was a preoccupation which darkened a time other people usually remember fondly.

I never really outgrew it.  Instead, my childhood fear morphed into a fascination and even a yearning as I got older.  Historic missing persons cases such as those of Judge Crater and Richard Colvin Cox have held a relentless grip on my imagination.  (I’ve already written about a couple of other cases in this space, namely those of folk singer Connie Converse and poet Weldon Kees.)  Lying in bed during any number of insomnia-wracked nights, I’ve tried to devise ways of escaping and starting over free from the past’s baggage.

Such fantasies aren’t unusual.  For most of us, they are just that and nothing more.  For a few, they have been well-laid plans successfully realized. 

It is generally thought that many adults who “disappear” are merely voluntary absentees.  There is no law preventing this.  If you want to leave, just get up and go. 

It’s a temptation, but one which has been increasingly circumscribed by the Information Age.  Most of the so-called disappearances I’ve read about occurred in a time when you could still reinvent yourself someplace else without fear of being caught.  A couple of recent news items show that despite the volumes of data collected on us it’s still possible to live undiscovered as someone else for a long stretch of time.

Both stories were unusual in that neither man really needed to resort to subterfuge.  The first was that of an Air Force captain who went missing in 1983.  The other concerned a man whose assumed identity was only discovered a decade and a half after his suicide.  William Howard Hughes, Jr., had abruptly left his post in New Mexico shortly after withdrawing a large amount of money from the bank.  Hughes had worked with the space program and held a top secret clearance.  It was conjectured Hughes had defected to the Soviet Union, which was thought to explain why nothing further was heard of him.  Joseph Newton Chandler III took his life in Ohio in 2002, leaving no known heirs.  A private investigator was hired to find any next of kin.

Hughes was found in California last month in the course of a passport fraud investigation.  He had been living under an assumed name for 35 years.  Hughes explained he had been depressed about his career and that’s why he left.  The Air Force plans to charge him with being AWOL.  The investigator in the Chandler case eventually found that the man known as Chandler was actually named Robert Ivan Nichols.  Nichols abandoned his family in the early 1960s, appropriating the identity of a child killed in an auto accident to cover his tracks.

Hughes could simply have resigned from the service and gotten on with his life.  Chandler / Nichols could have just divorced his wife and gotten on with his life.  Instead, each man chose a creative though ultimately troublesome route from an intolerable existence.  Each man had quietly dropped out.

My fascination with unexplained disappearances was rekindled years ago when I came across a book by Robert S. Gallagher titled If I Had It to Do Over Again: America’s Adult Dropouts.  The title is the book’s premise.  Like those of Messrs. Hughes and Nichols, most disappearances are best explained as decisions by rational adults to start anew as someone else.

Gallagher describes a number of such absences some of which have persisted in the popular imagination as well as others more obscure.  There was former child prodigy writer Barbara Newhall Follett, caught in an unhappy marriage, who left her Brookline, Massachusetts, apartment on a dreary December day in 1939 never to be heard from again. 

Then there was Gertrude Jones, who walked away from her Marin County home on a May morning in 1964.  She was last seen by a neighbor on State Route 1.  (Mrs. Jones, alas, was ultimately denied the romantic cachet of the disappeared: Her remains were discovered near her home in 2008.  The cause of death was a broken neck.  Her by then deceased husband, a longshoreman’s union official, is considered the likely murder suspect.) 

Yet another spooky vanishing was that of one Bruce Nelson Campbell, the “Man in the Green Pajamas,” who was discovered missing from his Jacksonville motel room in May 1959, leaving his glasses, wallet, and car keys a day after he had been treated by a doctor for “exhaustion.”   There is also the story of John T. Symes, Jr., a New York banker who left his small town in the autumn of 1963 saying he “had to get away for a while.”  He was last seen by a waitress at a Manhattan lunch counter. 

Perhaps the most interesting of Gallagher’s tales concerns an Illinois salesman named Orja Glenwood Corns, Jr., if only because the author gives us a detailed narrative.   Mr. Corns found himself at loose ends on a sultry July evening in 1948.  His wife and kids were out of town and he had just gotten back from a business trip.  After opening all the windows in his stifling house, Corns drove to Chicago for a night on the town.  Apparently Corns fancied mixing among the demimonde, because he ended the night at a clip joint called the Parody Club on N. Clark Street. 

There he spent the $150 he brought with him (a healthy sum in 1948) and cashed two personal checks to keep the party going.  Corns left in the wee hours and hasn’t been seen since, though his mechanic claimed to have seen Corns driving through Winnetka a day or two later.  The Corns case resurfaced in the news occasionally over the next decade or so, such as when Mrs. Corns divorced her husband in 1954 on grounds of abandonment.  But…no account offered a viable explanation for why he was missing.

A centerpiece of Gallagher’s tome is the famous case of the dropout who got caught: Lawrence Bader, a.k.a. Fritz Johnson.  Larry Bader, a cash-strapped Ohio salesman—why do so many of these stories involve salesmen?—never returned from an impromptu solo fishing trip on Lake Erie in 1957.  He was last seen by Coast Guardsmen offering assistance as a storm set in.  Bader cheerfully waved them on.  His rented boat turned up the next day, slightly damaged, without its occupant.

Less than a week later a debonair gentleman calling himself Fritz Johnson surfaced in Omaha.  Hired as a bartender at the Roundtable steakhouse, Fritz soon became a beloved local character.  He signed his checks solely with the moniker, “Fritz.”  He pulled off charity stunts, such as spending a month sitting atop a flagpole raising money for polio research.  After losing an eye to cancer, he sported an eyepatch further enhancing his dashing persona.  He drove a converted hearse around town and lived in a bohemian bachelor pad.  (Eventually, though, Fritz settled down and married a young lady half his age.)  A skilled archer, Fritz was hired by a local TV station as a sportscaster.  His fame and legend grew.

One can’t hide in plain sight forever, though.  In Chicago on a business trip to a trade show, Fritz was spotted by Lawrence Bader’s niece who approached him and pointed out the resemblance between the two men.  Fritz naturally denied he was Larry Bader.  But further investigation backed up by a matching fingerprint comparison solved the Bader mystery.  Fritz claimed to be mystified; he was an orphan named John Johnson.  Even after a reunion with the family he abandoned, Fritz maintained the ruse.  But he didn’t have long to dwell on the past.  His cancer returned and the Man with the Double Life passed on in September 1966, less than a year and a half after he was outed by his niece.

Even though Larry Bader was caught in the end, his story offers intriguing possibilities.  If you kept your head down, you could probably avoid detection.  Robert Gallagher, writing in 1969, devotes several chapters in his book to various ways one could abruptly cut ties and cover one’s tracks.  Unfortunately, few if any of these would work in the early 21^st century. 

Take for instance the mundane but vital Social Security number.  Gallagher describes how you could dummy up a certified copy of a birth certificate not your own, walk into a Social Security office and apply for a card in that individual’s name.  Until relatively recently this was doable.  I lived my first fourteen years without a Social Security number.  Neither my parents nor I needed me to have one back then.  I finally applied when I was in high school and wanted an after-school job.  My two sons, on the other hand, who were born in the 1990s, were automatically issued numbers a few weeks after their birth.  Nowadays it would look awfully suspicious for a mature adult born in this country to apply for a new Social Security card out of the blue.  (I suppose you could claim to be Canadian, but then you’d have to fake a green card on top of your other deceptions.)

Social media and digital records of our every move have obviated most of the strategies Gallagher covered nearly fifty years ago.  Even then, they were becoming tenuous.  If you fall off the radar today, it’s probably because you have ceased to live.  Going off the grid can lower, but not eliminate, your profile.  And that’s a pity.

I’ve more or less stopped dreaming of walking away and starting over.  Once upon a time, however, my dreams of escape kept me halfway sane.  Living in South Florida in my late twenties, married with a kid and another on the way and stuck in a soul-crushing job which barely left me time to breathe on my own, I would enviously watch the kids on the beaches and in the bars as I drove down A1A. 

At times like these I would lapse into a reverie of a different life.  I knew I could never be nineteen again, and so I set my sights on a less idealistic ideal.  I would drift down to Miami, maybe to the Keys.  I would work as a dishwasher or a day laborer.  I’d live in cheap motels and drink cheap beer in dive bars. 

Then, my cell phone would ring.  (I actually carried one of those goddamned things then.  My boss insisted.)  Or, if someone was in the car with me, they would speak and my pipe dream of living out a Jimmy Buffett song would burst like a soap bubble in a baby’s bath. 

I think that’s how it works out for most of us.  But even if we didn’t have cold feet, the Big Brother corporate state makes the possibility of carrying out an escape nigh impossible.

You could say you were never here, but your footprints would give you away.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar