Seven

Jack Kenneth Barron was born October 21, 1961, in Castro Valley, California, the only son of Elmore J. Barron, then 22, and his wife, the 19-year-old former Roberta Ann Leoni.

Young Elmore married Roberta on December 30 of the year before, 1960, in Reno, Nevada. Roberta was just 18 at the time of the marriage.

Whether the experience of Roberta’s becoming pregnant so soon after their marriage unnerved the two young parents, or for whatever other reason, there were no Barron siblings to follow. Later, both Jack and Roberta were to contend that Elmore always maintained he was sterile, and so could not have been Jack’s real father. Roberta angrily denied that she had slept with any other man, either before or after marrying Elmore.

Roberta was a staunch Catholic girl, the daughter of Eugene Leoni and his wife, Edith, longtime residents of the North Bay area. By the accounts of those who knew her, Roberta seems to have been a very strong-willed person with definite, even rigid ideas of what was appropriate behavior. She also, as she grew older, came to believe deeply in signs, omens, and portents, and became devoted to astrology; indeed, some who knew her did not hesitate in describing Roberta as superstitious.

As the early sixties unfolded, Elmore, Roberta, and little Jack moved to Orange County in Southern California, where Elmore obtained work on the Southern Pacific Railroad. There Jack attended elementary school and the first years of junior high school, all of those grades in the strictest Roman Catholic tradition.

Despite this religious presence, by the early 1970s the marriage between Elmore and Roberta was in terminal trouble. Roberta objected to Elmore’s frequent absences, while Elmore grew more withdrawn from his wife. Jack watched these power struggles almost as if he were an unseen spectator as far as Elmore and Roberta were concerned, at least according to those who knew Elmore and Roberta.

Judging from those observations, and from those who came to know him, it appears that Jack was heavily influenced, albeit in quite different ways, by both his father and his mother. He admired Elmore, and perhaps even envied him, right down to wanting to emulate his career as a railroad man. At the same time it also appears that Elmore was a distant figure in his son’s life, a stern, even forbidding presence.

In an anecdote that was as revealing of Elmore as it was of Jack, Elmore was to recall that Jack was “fastidious” as much about his behavior as his person or surroundings.

“Maybe Jack got part of that from me, because I used to come home from work and see him leaning against my car with his foot on the bumper or something,” Elmore was to tell the Sacramento Bee newspaper years later.

“I have a rough voice anyway, and I would tell him, ‘Get your foot off that bumper, it wasn’t put there for you to prop up on.’ And I had expensive cars, like Mercedes and Volvos.”

Other than setting such arbitrary and seemingly petty rules, one does not get the sense that Elmore was much involved emotionally in his son’s life, except to demonstrate his power as a locomotive engineer. There are no anecdotes about father-son activities, like a trip to a ball game or camping out overnight; no Boy Scouts, no mutual hobbies or interests, no real interest in “Jackie,” as Elmore persisted in calling his son even into Jack’s thirties, as anything other than an appendage of Elmore.

Certainly, there is no evidence that Elmore did much to groom his son as to what it meant to be a man.

Instead, it appears that much of Jack’s upbringing was left to Roberta. By all accounts, Roberta doted on Jack—just as long as Jack conformed to what Roberta believed were appropriate standards of behavior, which were sharply defined by Roberta’s religion.

“She waited on him hand and foot,” an acquaintance was to recall later, even into Jack’s adulthood. And when Jack occasionally rebelled against Roberta’s standards, Roberta was quick to offer blandishments designed to bring Jack back under her control-by-servitude.

As a staunch Catholic, Roberta had very strong ideas of morality, and she endeavored mightily to see that Jack embodied those ideals. For Roberta and hence Jack, church attendance was a very prominent, even mandatory activity. And at the same time, Jack’s personality seemed to subsume something of Roberta’s; even years later, some of Jack’s acquaintances would remark on the slight undertone of femininity in Jack’s personality. For all his size, it seemed to some that Jack was the quintessential “mama’s boy.”

As a result of these influences, there grew in Jack a number of contradictory impulses: on one hand, admiration of his father, both for Elmore’s dominating personality and for the way Elmore stood up to the ubiquitously powerful Roberta, coupled to an unrequited boyhood yearning for respect from Elmore; on the other, dependence on and resentment of his mother, who provided his emotional needs and the behavioral model he needed to adhere to in order to maintain this emotional support.

All of these contradictory impulses were brought to the surface when, in the mid-seventies, the marriage of Elmore and Roberta finally shattered. As Elmore was to describe it later, this time it was Roberta who accused Elmore of sexual infidelity. Elmore became angry at Roberta and denied this.

When Roberta persisted in her accusations, Elmore told her that since he couldn’t convince her otherwise, he might as well leave that very night. And so he did, walking away from the marriage and “Jackie” without a single backward glance.

Later Elmore was to estimate that he had seen Jack no more than three times over the next two decades.

Furious and bitter, Roberta left Orange County and returned to her roots in the Bay Area, taking then 13-year-old Jack with her. Both mother and son were impoverished, a condition Roberta frequently and vociferously blamed on the “irresponsibility” of Elmore, who, in Roberta’s view, was more interested in playing around with other women than in taking responsibility for his son. From that point forward, Jack was given to understand by his mother that his father was a worthless, irresponsible, duplicitous cretin who didn’t give a damn about Jack.

Losing one’s male parental role model, even one as remote as Elmore appears to have been, would be difficult enough for any 13-year-old. For Jack, the loss was made even more difficult by the move north, which thrust him into strange surroundings, into new schools, where he knew no one and no one knew him. The separation also increased Roberta’s influence over Jack. Survivors of the Elmore wreckage, they became even more dependent on one another.

Roberta went on welfare for a time, and had to sue Elmore for $2,000 in back financial support. Finally, in the late 1970s, things began to stabilize when Roberta got a job as a Safeway produce clerk. One thing led to another, and Roberta fell in love with the store’s assistant manager, Bob Butler. By the end of the 1970s, Roberta and Butler were married. By then, also, Jack was ready to graduate from high school, and to face the daunting prospect of living on his own.