My stepfather was a man’s man. He didn’t play around when it came to the correct way to raise up a child. My biological father, not so much. See, my parents divorced in June 1966, and both remarried thereafter.

His name was Gene Dickinson, and he was a correctional officer at Lorton Penitentiary outside Washington DC for many years. Later in his career, he became an instructor at the prison and taught auto mechanics to the inmates that were only there for a short time.

The scared straight part happened one Saturday when I was in the ninth grade. He needed to go to his office (in the middle of the penitentiary) to pick up some paperwork. He asks if I wanted to go and I said, sure. I was 14 years old at the time and he knew exactly what he was doing and what was going to happen. Once we were cleared through the gate, we were walking to the auto shop school which took us right down the middle of the jail cell blocks that housed the inmates behind bars. Most of these were serving life sentences. Without putting too fine a point to this, the things the inmates said to me and yelled through the bars at me as we walked to the shop, scared me so bad that I made a decision that day that set the course of my life. I was never going to do anything that would put me in a place like this.

Yessiree, the things that were said to a young teenage white boy, will make your ears curl and make you want to avoid ever being in a place like that.

A year earlier this same man sat me down at the table and popped the top on a Budweiser and opened a pack of Marlboros and said, “I know you are going to try both of these things, so I want you to try them first in front of me.”  After I spit out the beer and inhaled half a Marlboro, I never drank after that and never got hooked on cigarettes. He knew exactly what he was doing.

See in life, there is the father that gives you life and then there is the father that gives you A life. That was Gene Dickinson, my stepfather. KT