In October of 1927, when my grandfather, William Ignatius Brooks, was just 12 years old, he ran away from his grandfather’s house in Lawrence, MA.
He had been sent to live with his maternal grandfather, Walter Chandler of the Lawrence Police Department, because he developed a habit of running away, and his parents couldn’t seem to stop him.
I guess they hoped that a tough police officer could whip him into shape, but ultimately, he failed as well. Desperate to find him, my great-grandfather, William Essex Brooks, reached out to the press and gave an interview with the Boston Globe asking the public for any information on his whereabouts.
“Father Seeks Malden Boy,” read the headline. It read like every parent’s worst nightmare when it stated, “A father appealed to the Globe yesterday for aid in locating his son, William I. Brooks, 12, who has been missing from the home of his grandfather, Walter A. Chandler, clerk of the Lawrence police, since Oct. 3, when he started for school.”
The article noted his tendency to wander and explained that he often eluded being caught because he looked older than he was: “The youngster, who is big for his age, has been seized with the wanderlust at various times in the past year and was missing at one time for four days.”
The article described him as a loner who “rarely mingled with other children” and liked to carve things out of wood. He had apparently been attending a parochial school in Lawrence after transferring from the Linden School in Malden following the discovery of his “urge to wander” the previous year.
He was described as 5 feet tall, 125 pounds, with a dark complexion, round features, and full, dark eyes. He apparently had a noticeable scar on the left side of his neck, which was the result of an operation, and a scar on his left knee.
He was reportedly wearing what I guess all 12-year-old boys wore in the 1920s: a brown, imitation leather blouse, black stockings, a gray cap, and either brown corduroy or gray tweed trousers.
His parents were “worried sick,” the article said, and his father couldn’t even go to work because he was so busy searching for his son.
The article ended with a plea for information about his whereabouts, explaining that they wanted to hear from him so they could send him some money “until he tires of wandering.”
The story gets even weirder when another article was published in the Boston Globe the following day announcing that he had been traced to Gloucester, where he had apparently lied about his age and background and joined a fishing crew, but still had not been found, as it was believed he was out at sea.
A crew member of the fishing schooner Marjorie Parker recognized him from his photo in the newspaper and identified him as a boy who had applied to become a member of the crew earlier that month.
He had apparently found lodging at a local boardinghouse, but the owners took him to the police the following day. Although he gave his real name, he lied to the police and told them he was an orphan and that his father had drowned on the schooner Commonwealth.
The police then took him to the overseer of the poor, who gave him enough money to return to Lawrence. He was supposed to return again to the overseer’s office but failed to do so because he left on a fishing trip with a small shore boat called the Julia.
It was believed that by the time his parents had followed him to Gloucester, he had shipped out yet again on another fishing boat. There are no other news updates about him after that date, so I’m guessing he eventually returned home.
Just 10 years later, his name surfaced again in a Boston Post article in which he was identified as a young man from Malden who was mildly injured in a fiery motorcycle accident. It seemed he had returned home but was still the same thrill-seeker he always was.
He never did tire of wandering, though. He grew up, got married, had kids, and joined the army. Then, sometime around 1945, my grandfather suddenly disappeared again, abandoning his wife and three kids.
Much like his parents did decades before, when my grandmother couldn’t find him, she reached out to the press, this time to the Newburyport Daily News, and published an ad for “William I. Brooks of unknown residence,” telling him she was seeking a divorce for the cause of “cruel and abusive treatment.”
This is a common practice when an abandoned spouse wants a divorce but can’t locate the other spouse to serve them divorce papers. The abandoned spouse is supposed to put an ad in the paper for a specific amount of time informing the other spouse that they want a divorce, and if the spouse still doesn’t respond, the divorce is granted. Not surprisingly, my grandfather never responded to the ad, and the divorce was eventually granted.
Apparently, my grandmother wasn’t the only one looking for him at the time either because the FBI also started coming around and inquiring into his whereabouts. She had no idea where he was, but that didn’t stop them from returning repeatedly and badgering her. She never did find out why they were chasing him.
My grandfather continued to wander, it seems, for a while after that. In 1950, he appeared as an extra in the classic western Winchester ’73 and also reportedly worked as an extra in a number of other westerns too, even one starring John Wayne. There’s even a weird family story about the cast of that film all getting food poisoning and my grandfather relieving himself next to John Wayne at the latrine.
By the 1960s, he was back on the East Coast, living in New Jersey, where he had remarried and had another child, under an assumed name, Bartholomew Langford.
It was here that he met his end in 1971. While playing with his country and western band at a bar in a small town in Pennsylvania, he apparently had too much to drink, and his bandmates laid him down in the backseat of their car to sleep it off. When they returned a little while later, he was already dead.
“Immediate Cause: Asphyxia,” the autopsy report later read. “Due to: Aspiration of gastric material. Due to: Alcoholic Ingestion. Interval between onset and death: minutes.”
Turns out, in his drunken stupor he had choked on his own vomit. He died in the backseat of the car all alone, Hank Williams-style. Not only had he lived like a wandering cowboy, but he died like one too.
Sources:
“Father Seeks Malden Boy.” The Boston Globe, 20 Oct. 1927, p. 36.
“Traces Son to Gloucester.” The Boston Globe, 21 Oct. 1927, p. 32.
“Three Injured in Motorbike Crash.” The Boston Post, 20 Apr. 1937, p. 6.