The year 1954 was a banner year in American pop culture history. Both McDonald’s and Burger King opened their first fast-food restaurants. Sports Illustrated hit newsstands. M&M’s were launched. Bazooka Joe comics were introduced, as was Trix cereal and Play-Doh. More seriously, Dr. Sam Sheppard was accused of murdering his wife, proclaiming his innocence by telling police a “bushy-haired man” broke into his home and committed the crime. In what would become an issue of heated debate some fifty years later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the phrase “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance, changing the popular school morning ritual from “one nation, indivisible,” to “one nation, under God, indivisible.”
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court weighed in on its ruling regarding what would turn out to be a landmark case in the civil rights movement. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the court agreed that “segregation in public schools [was] unconstitutional,” which, some say, “paved the way for large-scale desegregation.”
For a man who would later develop a deep-seated hatred for African Americans—and have no trouble voicing his bigotry and disdain, routinely calling blacks “niggers” and Puerto Ricans “spicks”—1954 was, ironically, the same year he had been brought into this world. On October 7, 1954, twenty-two-year-old Flora Mae Flanders Evans, who had lived in and around the Capital District her entire life, gave birth to her second child, a blue-eyed, pudgy little boy of about eight pounds she named Gary Charles. Five years prior, in 1949, Flora Mae had given birth to a girl, Robbie, fathered by her first husband, Ross Edmonds. Ross had abandoned Flora Mae shortly after Robbie was born so he could travel with the carnival. Leroy Evans, Gary Charles’s father, came into their lives a few years later and, at the beginning, seemed to be a lifesaver.
Leroy’s family of devout Catholics did not approve of the relationship between Flora Mae and Leroy. They felt debased by anyone who didn’t follow the family’s same strict set of religious guidelines, which Leroy had been set on a path toward from his birth in March 1932. Going to church wasn’t an option; it was family law. Like many households back in those days, balancing the effects of the Depression and the fallout of two world wars, life for Leroy became pious, regimented and, in many ways, simple: attend school, church, study the Bible, never miss Sunday school. Poverty wasn’t something families complained about; it was a way of life.
Because they had grown accustomed to a hard-knock life, the Evans family ran a tight ship and shunned those who weren’t like them.
“We were not really welcomed into Leroy’s family,” Gary Charles’s half sister, Robbie, recalled years later, “because my mom was divorced, already had a child and was Protestant.”
Indeed, in the eyes of Leroy’s family, Flora Mae was an outcast. If her first husband had left her with a child, there must have been a good reason behind it.
“They went to church all the time,” Robbie added. “They were always loving to us kids…[but] hypocrites at the same time.”
Leroy, Robbie claimed, was always treated like the “black sheep of the family.” His mother and father disowned him after he married Flora Mae.
Not too long after they were married and Leroy and Flora Mae set up a home in Troy on First Street, most of their new friends and neighbors, as well as the kids and Flora Mae, dropped the “Le” from his name and started calling him “Roy.” An army air corps pilot in the late ’40s and early ’50s, by 1957 Roy had grown into a scrappy man with skinny arms and legs, an oval face and patchouli oil slicked-back black hair that shone like chrome. He would later brag to anyone who would listen about his tail gunner days and how he was routinely shot at by the enemy. He had a hole in the side of his stomach, Robbie remembered, but was embarrassed and never talked about it.
The Evans family lived on the bottom floor of a three-story, red-brick-faced apartment building, merely a block from the Hudson. The building had one of those monument-like concrete stairways leading up to the front door from the sidewalk, much like a 1920s-era big-city library. Along First Street, in any direction, were run-down bars and saloons, butcher shops, markets and five-and-dimes. The streets were narrow. When cars parked on both sides, the roads became tunnellike. The street gutters were always full of garbage, cigarette butts, soda pop bottles, cans and dirt. Like most kids in the neighborhood, for Gary Charles and Robbie, summer days revolved around stickball and dodgeball games, hopscotch and jump rope, while winter involved snowball fights and sledding and skating in nearby Washington Park. In between the Evanses’ apartment building was an alleyway—or sandlot—where the kids could play tag or just hang out.
“We would just sit on the front porch,” Robbie remembered later, “and eat Fudgsicles and drink RC Cola. We’d play games in the alley.”
The late ’50s and early ’60s were prosperous times for Troy residents. With Uncle Sam murals spread about town, the city latched onto what had become an all-American relic and had become known as the birthplace of Mr. America. The city wasn’t necessarily devoid of any trouble or social suffering, but industry roared along. There was plenty of work at the oil refineries and steel mills. The schools were respectable. Taxes were fair. There was a sense of community. Neighbors helped one another. There were block parties, PTA meetings, cookouts. People, generally, cared about one another.
With the vast mountains of Rensselaer and Albany Counties a fifteen-minute drive from downtown Troy in any direction, and the abundance of fish in the Hudson, Roy and Flora Mae hunted and fished as often as they could. Roy was a man’s man; he liked guns and beer and all things masculine. Together, during the early years of their marriage, he and Flora spent time catching fish and shooting wild game, bringing it home to feed the family. The kids in the neighborhood, including Robbie and Gary Charles, would even get into the act. They’d use chicken scraps they found at the Chuckrow Chicken Plant on River Street, fasten them to safety pins and string and catch carp and eels out of the Hudson River. They would sell them, as Robbie later put it, to “the Jewish and Negro neighbors.”
There was one time when a chicken from the Chuckrow plant got loose, Robbie recalled, and ended up in the Evans backyard. In a flurry of physical strength and determination, Flora Mae chased the young bird, cornered it and grabbed it by the neck. After snapping its neck as if it were a brittle twig, she chopped the bird’s head off on the back porch in front of all the kids. “Chicken tonight!” she said, holding the headless bird in the air as if it were a trophy.
According to Robbie, life inside the home during those early years was, for the most part, normal and rather mundane. As long as, she was quick to point out, Flora and Roy were working and had money. When they didn’t, and they had to depend on free food from nearby churches and warehouses, trouble arose. Additionally, Roy demanded that the kids stay close to the apartment. Robbie and Gary Charles were allowed to ride their bicycles down the block, between Washington and Adams Streets and back, but that was it. If they went any farther, there would be a price to pay. The apartment had a large picture window in the front living room. Roy would sit, chain-smoking Lucky Strikes, drinking Schaefer beer and listening to his police scanner. Every once in a while, he would get up from his chair and check on the children to see if they were abiding by his rules. It wasn’t about making sure they were safe, a family friend later said, because Roy never worried about the kids in that respect. It had to do with living under his reign of power. If the kids disobeyed him, as they often did, look out!
Trouble—serious trouble—didn’t begin, Robbie said, until after Roy got into a car accident and lost his job.
“He went through the windshield,” she said. “Shortly after, he was diagnosed with epilepsy. He had seizures pretty often when he combined his medication with alcohol.”
By then, Gary Charles, who had turned ten, was a scrappy-looking kid who wore thick, black horn-rimmed Buddy Holly–style prescription glasses, like his mother and father. As with most boys during those days, he sported a buzz cut, much like the astronauts of the Apollo. Neighbors and former friends recall him being “lost and quiet” for the most part, never really saying too much unless he was asked to speak. During his grammar school days, Gary Charles excelled, generally garnering straight A’s across the board. He liked to read comic books in his second-story bedroom and watch Robbie and Flora dance around the living room while they listened to Mario Lanza, Hank Williams and Roy Rogers records. One of the more crowning moments in Gary Charles’s young life came when Robert Kennedy, on the campaign trail, stopped in Troy and Gary Charles was photographed shaking his hand. The look in young Gary’s eyes showed a boy who marveled at the prospect of being able to touch the hand of someone so powerful and famous. The photo appeared in a local Troy newspaper and brought him a meager brush of fame he enjoyed at home and school for days afterward.
Old photos of the family depict a child whose mother took pride in dressing her only boy. In particular, one photo that would resonate later with Gary Charles’s life of crime shows a little boy dressed down in a three-piece black suit, black tie and white shirt. He is wearing a fedora, like Dick Tracy or Frank Sinatra. Smirking modestly, Gary Charles is the spitting image of Chicago gangster Al Capone.