Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [75]
Lyden paused and glanced again at the photo of his old class. “I remember that I always felt sorry for your brother Frank,” he said, “but I never felt sorry for Gary. One night after a school dance, my wife and I were driving along and we saw Frank walking home by himself in the dark. I recall thinking that if he and Gary had been close, wouldn’t they have walked home together? Frank was walking along alone that night, his head bent down, his shoulders stooped. He looked like he was carrying the weight of the world on his back, and he was just a kid. I remember thinking, ‘He’s the one who never gets any attention.’ Gary always got a lot of attention. Much of it was negative, but negative attention is still attention.”
Many years later, when Gary was on Utah’s death row and was news all over the nation, Tom Lyden was following the story as closely as anyone. The day Gary was shot, Lyden felt a special pang. No matter what Gary had done, he hated to see him come to this end. That same day, he got a call from Larry Schiller in Provo, Utah. Schiller wanted to talk to somebody who could tell him something about Gary’s childhood. At first, Lyden was surprised that Gary had even remembered him, but what Schiller said next devastated the teacher: Gary had told Schiller and his lawyers that Tom Lyden was the teacher he had most valued and respected. In fact, he cited Lyden as one of the few people he had reached out to for help, but my brother realized he had probably been too recalcitrant for the teacher, and he felt bad that he had let Lyden down.
“At that time in 1977,” Lyden said, “I was principal at Rose City Park School, in Portland, and we had a kid there who was a real problem to us and to himself and to his school. I had wanted the two teachers involved to reach out more for this boy, but they’d had it up to here and just wanted to get rough with him and turn him over to the authorities. The day after I got the call from Mr. Schiller, we had a staff meeting about this kid and I told those teachers the story. I said, ‘Yesterday, I got a telephone call about Gary Gilmore. Gary told somebody that he once had an eighth-grade teacher whom he’d held his hand out to, and that teacher didn’t quite reach for it. He said he thought that perhaps that teacher could have made the difference in his life. That teacher was me. Now, what are you going to do about this youngster?’ After that, they were falling all over themselves to reach for that kid.
“In all the years since then, I’ve never forgotten the lesson that Gary taught me,” said Lyden. “I have always told teachers, ‘Take all the steps that you’re capable of, and then take one more. If this were your kid, you would want people to keep reaching for him.’ ”
I HAVE STUDIED THE picture of Gary that Tom Lyden gave me many times. No other image of my brother has ever torn my heart more or made me feel closer to him. It captures one of those few moments in Gary’s life that I can readily identify with, because it’s one of the few in which I can easily find myself. The first thing about the photo that strikes me is that I had a face that was almost identical to Gary’s at the same age. Gary wasn’t smiling in the picture, he didn’t look like he belonged with these people in this place, and that was a feeling I carried about my own identity throughout all the years I attended school. Everything about the way he held himself in the picture—the way he pulled his body back from the grouping of the other students, the way he was looking intently at something outside of the photo’s frame, some distraction that interested him more than joining the gaze of his friends—all this says that he was a boy who felt different from the people and the values around him. Some of that, no doubt, was a pose. Gary wanted to be respected, but he didn’t want to be regarded as square or nice or ordinary. Instead, he wanted to be feared—probably because that was the only thing that could