Here are the clues, as best related through the mists of time:
(BTW: this story requires an understanding of the contrast between right Vs left-wing ideology, which were different 34 years ago. At the risk of insulting your intelligence, I’ll parenthetically note those 1967/2001 diffs)
My mom and dad were heavily involved in the civil-rights movement of the 1960’s (this was before the “Civil Rights” evolved into “Black Power” and white people like Mom and Dad were still welcome). They’d gotten into this through their membership in the Catholic Church (the Catholic Church was once an instrument of Liberalism, not Conservatism - which is why Louisiana had fewer lynchings than her Protestant neighbor states - although my story transpired in even more bigoted than any Illinois) . Some priest had drawn attention to the fact during a mid-winter sermon that Black men could be seen still wearing light Summer clothes while escorted by winter-coated policemen on the shameful walk between the jail and the courthouse. While most white folks politely looked the other way or impolitely surmised that Blacks were too stupid to dress for the weather, someone had remarked that people were being held without bail for months at a time.
Soon people both Back and White were coming to our house for discussion groups. We kids were timely sent to bed but could still hear the laughs and the shouts and the sudden silences after the shouts that were going on downstairs.
As guests, everyone would be shown the show-off stuff of our home. For my dad, this meant showing off his gun collection. My dad was an engineer who appreciated the engineering beauty of firearms (Liberalism and the 2ND Amendment were not mutually exclusive at that time - in fact: my dad thought that one’s rights are respected in direct proportion to one’s ability to shoot back. Both Mao and the Michigan Militia are on agreement on this one)
And now on to the whodunit:
One night, while my mom was still working the 3-11 shift and we’d been put to bed, my dad heard a knock on the back door. There was a young white woman there asking for help. When my dad opened the door a shotgun was stuck in his face and he was quickly blindfolded and bound with wire to the JC Penney tube-metal frame of one of our kitchen chairs.
Robbery MO: the invaders left us kids asleep - in fact I barely remember someone looking into our room and must’ve thought it just my dad routinely checking. They flipped and floored every book on the 4-shelf library, looking (or as if to look for) hidden dollars. They took our obviously worthless b/w TV (cutting the cord rather than unplugging it).
And they raided every gun in the cabinet.
My poor, pajama-clad dad was untrussed from the chair, re-trussed and packed into a car and driven, still blindfolded, into the winter night. Facing the prospect of death, he was driven in silence into the country and dumped out into a farmer’s field. Family history does not record if cowshit was mixed with human’s under that night’s moon, but my dad did indeed make it back home later on.
Now, You decide (myself I cannot - and Catholic-forgiving-like, my dad won’t even consider after all these years) who pulled this caper: the more radical elements of those who my dad had invited into his home and to whom had shown the gun collection, or those on the other side who knew of the collection from his shooting acquaintance and was worried of its ownership? But why did they take that useless TV? Why make a show of looking for money in the books (both the cops and their former “guests” woud know of that robber’s practice)? And why didn’t they simply kill my dad? Were they his erstwile friends sparing his life but yet gaining an arsenal, or the cops out to throw a scare into him and neutralising that arsenal all in one fell swoop? Somebody organized that heist, but who, and for which purpose?
(Of course there is the third option, that it was out-and -out crooks scoring some saleable firemarms. But because that was remote small-town USA in 1967, I think that’s the least likely of the 3.)
