When Me and My Family Went Missing in the 1970s

A true story.

My entire family, my mom, dad, me and my brother all went missing in 1979.

I was 14, a freshman in high school. I considered this quaint little town my home. It’s wonderful people, my friends. I was on the drill team; which I loved! I played softball in the summers. I was on a bowling team in the winter. It’s where I became a Girl Scout, rode my bicycle down the Jumbo. Sang songs with my best friend out on the lawn (it was the 70s!). Where I would sing way too loud to the radio and records in my room to the dismay of the boy next door. (I owe him an apology!) Rode my bike everywhere! It is where my grandmother died. Where I got my first job. It is where I grew up. It was home.

We’d lived there since I was in the third grade. My parents owned the Ford Dealership in town. Dad would do these silly commercials for the dealership. We would close off the streets downtown and have all night sales with a band and food during the summers on the weekend. Dad did a gimmick one year where he would trade a car for anything on wheels. Someone traded in an organ. Dad brought the organ home and I remember spending hours in the living room teaching myself how to play the organ. I have a scar on my right hip from wrecking a mini-bike he brought home!

In the fourth grade, my teacher, Miss Zeiters’ gave guitar lessons. We would go to her apartment after school, which was located in the basement of the bank. It reminded me of the apartment on the show Laverne and Shirley. She seem to be a very young teacher, early in her career and I looked up to her. Having her own little apartment and living on her own.

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[...] It was a cold February in Illinois. Middle of the week. I went to school on Tuesday. So did my brother. Mom and dad went to work at the dealership. Just an ordinary day. We ended the day as usual. Having supper around 6pm that evening. Watched television and I laid out my clothes for school the next day before going to bed. Thinking I would wake up to what I thought would be a normal Wednesday. […]

Years later in the 1990s, in my thirties, I returned to that town. Everyone was very accommodating and kind. A few old friends kindly spent the day with me. I think I needed it for some sort of closure after the way we ‘left’. I did not get the chance to say goodbye to anyone. Maybe it was because those 8 years was the only stable time in my life growing up. I loved living there. It felt safe. The people were nice. We had some structure finally.

Before moving to this little town in Illinois we had moved a lot. I was born in Chicago, Illinois but in 1968 the volatile racial tensions and anti-war riots in Chicago forced my dad to move us back to Tennessee where he and my mother was from. We stayed only a couple of years and was back in Illinois by the time I started the first grade. I ended up going to three different schools in first grade alone. Two different schools in the third grade. We had moved seven times between the time we left Tennessee to return to Illinois and the time we ended up in the small town of which I speak when I was in the middle of third grade. By the time I left home to live on my own we had move about twenty times.

The one exception was the 8 years we actually stayed in one place. That lovely little town in Illinois.

[…] One of my friends, that day I visited in the 1990s brought “it” up, saying, “one day you guys were here and the next you were just gone”. Her statement said with a friendly but questioning tone to it.

At the time I just wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. I swayed the conversation to something else. The events of those few days and the time that follow have always been on my mind. It was a difficult period for me. At the time it was traumatic. Perhaps because of the way it all played out. Kids appear resilient. Things happen and we appear to be just fine. Then years later….. we’re needing therapy! Okay, I haven’t gone to therapy about this, but I did feel the need to talk about it. I still feel the need to talk about it. This may not have been an experience that would be upsetting to all and for sure, the further I get away from it the easier it is. So thank you for listening to one girl’s childhood tale. I wish this were the only one that troubled me.

So what happened?

I want to preface by saying that my parents grew up very poor in Tennessee. They moved us a lot because my dad was trying very hard to make a better life for himself and his family. When an opportunity presented itself he felt like he needed to take it. His brother had bought a car dealership in Illinois and then decided he wanted to move to Florida and ask my dad if he wanted to buy it instead. And off we went! My parents are both gone now and lived a full life. They had many adventurous, did things they probably only dreamed of and made many, many friends along the way that became like family.

[…]

I went to bed that Tuesday night. Around midnight I awoke to see my dad on his hands and knees next to my bed. The room was quite dark; lights all still off. Just the light of the moon through the window. Now I can tell you this was not something my father normally did! This was very abnormal behavior. He was nearly whispering to me. “Paula, pack one overnight bag like you’re going to spend the night with someone. Be at the back door in fifteen minutes. Do not use the phone. Do not turn on the lights and do not walk past any windows. Get down and crawl.”

And then he left. I did as I was told. I crawled to my closet in the dark. Grabbed my little blue floral overnight bag and filled it with some clothes, my toothbrush, hairbrush, probably some acne cream and a couple of paperback books. I made my way down the long hall, down the back stairwell, closest to the backdoor and found my mom and dad and my brother there, at the backdoor. Dad was staring out into the dark. Mom and my brother standing behind him. Silent. No back porch light on. It was a very dark night.

We lived in the country where there were no street lights. A dark cornfield backlit only by the moon was behind our house. No neighbors for at least a mile on either side and no one across the road. It was also February in Illinois; snowy and cold. The silence was so loud it felt harassing. (I still have trouble sitting in silence.)

Then I heard the low rumble of a car engine. No headlights, just the sound. I peered over my dad’s shoulder and saw a large dark object creeping down the darkness of the drive, a dome light on the inside of the vehicle came on as it slowed to a halt. My dad said, in a whisper, “when I say go everyone walk quickly to the car. Get in the back seat and don’t say anything”.

And off we went.

This part, crossing the yard from the back door of the house to the car I recall as feeling especially scary for some reason. Like the further I got from the safety of the house the more scared I felt. Where am I going? Whose car is this? Who is driving the car?

I ended up in the backseat behind the driver. Mom next to me, my brother on the other side of her and my dad got in the passenger side of the front seat with the driver.

Now guys, I know I am with my family, but I was just a fourteen year old girl. This was not normal for my family. This was not something we had ever done before. I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t know at the time we would never return! At the time the scariest part was I had no idea where we were going or why we were doing this. We just drove off (without the headlights on) and left all of our things, all our stuff at the house. So, I did not have any understanding that we were actually moving or leaving and never coming back. It seemed we drove forever without the headlights of the car on down those long country roads.

I don’t know how much time had passed but finally my dad and the man driving started talking. Thank goodness. That silence was scaring me like the silence at the back door! It felt spooky on some level.

I realized I recognized the voice of the driver. It was my uncle. At some point I fell asleep and when I woke up I was at my granddads house in Tennessee.

We did not return to school that year. I have no idea how they explained it. Over the summer we moved into a single wide trailer on the far back of a 280 acre pig farm on a road called Butcher Hollow pronounced holler in the south. Seriously. We did.

We enrolled in school that fall for my sophomore year. Instead of working at the car dealership after school helping my mom file parts invoices I found myself hauling hay, holding the hind legs of a piglet while my dad castrated them (I do not recommend doing this job), riding along on Saturday mornings in a truck started by using a screw driver to get whey for the pigs from the cheese factory in town and going to live animal auctions after instead of car auctions in Chicago, Danville or Peoria. Learning what a ‘down’ cow was came in handy later when I found myself working in the office of a slaughter house in my early twenties.

I have reconnected, now in my fifties, with many of my classmates from that little town thanks to social media but I have never talked about what happened that day. I had heard rumors that they briefly thought we may have been kidnapped. I think that was quickly straightened out but to be honest, I don’t really know.

As for the why it all played out that way I am still not ready to talk about that. Maybe later. I will tell you I myself did not find out the 'why' until much later in my mid to late twenties. I do know that a few from my little childhood town also know (they knew long before I found out) and most likely understand.

For some of us it is helpful to ‘talk’ about things from the past that haunt us, or trouble us in some way. I am one of those people. Thank you for reading about this part of my life. Writing it down can be helpful.

If you have something quirky or troublesome in your life that seems to continually tap you on the shoulder I encourage you to talk to someone or at least, write it down.