Teenage Crooks

Yesterday in our neighboring county Paulding the news reported two teenage boys have been expertly stealing merchandise for quiet a while now and has not sold any of it, they just hoarded it.

I think they were talking about an abandoned house they were keeping the stuff in. In the house was room after room of valuable merchandise that they somehow stole. One closet has about a dozen blowers neatly stacked in it and what struck me as being bizarre was a dining room table they stole, they had china, silver, and placemats down, just like it was in the showroom before they took it.

It also reminded me of my high school days. I was in school with two boys, DW and CB, who were very different from each other.

DW was a year a or two older, blond to a point his hair was almost white, and maybe shorter than average and he always seemed serious, and yet he had street smarts, he got in several hard blows fist fights through his high school career. I remember one Sunday after the end of a movie at the Strand Theater everybody were quickly marching over to the parking lot behind Dupre’s Store and beside the railway tracks. DW and somebody I don’t remember had a prearranged fight – one pissed off the other one at the Stand Theater, so it was payback time. They fought and fought, and kept on fighting. They both became very bloody with torn clothes. I don’t know who got in the most licks. I recall seeing DW in some more fights also. I don’t think he was a coward by any stretch.

CB on the other hand was very bright, but liked to act goofy, and tall. He did an excellent imitation of Red Skelton’s character Clem Kadiddlehopper. He worked park time at a historical park near Marietta and knew a lot about the historical events in sequence that happened at this park. I remember one time as a teenager I was hitchhiking on Roswell Street and he picked me up. He was driving and his mother was in the passenger seat. He had his learner’s license. To listen to CB and his mother was like listening to two professors, trying to impress each other with trivia facts they each knew.

DW traveled solo on a motor scooter here and there.

DW and CB had a two man thieving organization. They were experts in the stealing of merchandise business. You could go to a store in clothing store in downtown Marietta – there were not too many away from downtown back then – say pick out a nice suede jacket you wanted, come back and tell DW and/or DB what rack you found it on, the color, size, what the price tag said, and any other thing to help identify it and then all you had to do was be patient and you would receive that same suede jacket at a very cheap price. If it had a price of $45 they would probably take between ten and fifteen dollars.

That was the rumor or reputation that followed them. I honestly don’t know if it was true. Just by knowing each of them at a nodding distance, I suspect it was true.

About ten years after high school I went into a convenience store near Grant Park on Boulevard in Atlanta and saw DW working there. He told me he was the assistant manager. I would think he had a very interesting career in one way or another. I bet if you did research to follow his name you would start thinking his initials were A.K.A.

I saw on the news less than 20 years ago that CB was running for public office in either Dekalb County or its county seat Decatur. He lost.

Then, about ten years later CB was in the paper again, this time on the obituary page.