Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [6]
One day a traveling circus came through town and Steven went by himself to see it. There he met a fast-talking carny who convinced him he would see the world if he joined the traveling show. Steven never even returned home to pack his few belongings or to say goodbye to Uncle Claude and Eva Mae. Taking only his uncle’s gold watch that he was never without, the fifteen-year-old hitched a ride with the circus and rode with them out of Missouri and into his future.
Uncle Claude, meanwhile, searched desperately for the boy, unaware that he had run away and fearing something terrible had happened to him. After several days, he gave up and went back to the farm. If Steven was found alive, Uncle Claude vowed, he would never forgive him. If Steven was found dead, Uncle Claude would never forgive himself.
LIFE IN the circus proved more sawdust than stardust for Steven when he discovered the constant traveling was taking him nowhere fast. He wanted out of the life but could not go home again to face Uncle Claude. He took once more to living on the streets, hitchhiking from town to town and riding the freight trains with the hobos until eventually he found himself back in Los Angeles, where he reluctantly showed up at Jullian and Berri’s apartment. His mother was happy to see him but withheld her affection out of fear of setting off Berri, who greeted the boy with an indifference that bordered on anger.
The street kids’ greeting was not much warmer than that. They were always suspicious of members who came and went unless that revolving door had bars on it. To make his bones and “win back the other kids’ respect he meant to become the baddest ass of them all … if the gang leader decreed that ten hubcaps were to be stolen today by each gang member, Steve would bring back twenty.”
Besides stealing, the gangs frequently rumbled, fighting other gangs for cock-of-the-walk rights. Occasionally a police roundup would bring them to court. The first time Steven came before the local judge, he threatened to put the boy away for a long stretch if he ever saw his face again.
Jullian took him home, and Berri laid down a much tougher sentence. He beat Steven mercilessly and finished him off by throwing him down a flight of stairs. When the boy was finally able to stand up, bruised and bloody, with Berri hovering over him, he stared into his stepfather’s face and said, “You lay your stinkin’ hands on me again, and I swear I’ll kill ya.”
Soon enough, Steven was caught with a bunch of other boys trying to steal hubcaps, and Jullian tearfully signed the court order committing him to reform school. It was that or prison.
The California Junior Boys Republic at Chino was founded in 1907 by Margaret Fowler, a wealthy widow who devoted her life to social improvement and helping troubled youths straighten their lives out. Boys Republic was and still is located on 211 acres in the southwestern corner of San Bernardino County, a farm community that, besides the institution, also housed two state prisons, one for men and one for women. Boys Republic, one of the more progressive reform schools for juvenile delinquents that appeared during the last years of the Industrial Revolution, was filled to capacity in the Depression and again during World War II, times when many boys who got in trouble were either fatherless, gang members, or runaways. Steven was all three. On February 6, 1945, five weeks before his fifteenth birthday, Steven McQueen became number 3188.
The institution ran on a trust system operated by the boys themselves, supervised by adults. Steven twice escaped from the unfenced grounds, but was quickly apprehended and returned. The other boys did not appreciate having their privileges taken away because of one bad apple, and although paddling was the preferred discipline by the authorities, the boys had their own way of treating tough kids like