No, Daddy, Don't! Read Free Page B

he landed a job in Oregon as a hospital administrator and emergency services manager.
    It was in Oregon that John Jr. began his first year of high school, where he also played football. The following year, his father was transferred to New York City, much to John Jr.’s disappointment. He was yanked out of high school and forced to give up his football team and all the new friends he had made. But his father had a chance to set up the first addict-run drug clinic and the first publicly financed abortion clinic in the country.
    They lived in Dumont, New Jersey, a town of 20,000 in the upper northeast corner of the state, where John Jr. attended Dumont High School. Dumont was just across the Hudson River from New York.
    It was difficult for John to get close to his father, whom he saw as intolerant. Instead, he saved his attention for his mother, Julia, whom he loved very much. When his father became agitated and demanding, his mother would say, “Don’t get your dad upset. Just go to your room.”
    Always the peacemaker in the family, Julia was a woman with fragile emotional health. She suffered from severe depression for weeks at a time, and once had been treated at Englewood Hospital for eighteen days. She drank heavily to alleviate her depression, but that merely intensified her problem.
    Her hospitalization at Englewood had provided only temporary relief, because her despondency came back. On the evening of December 5, 1972, her husband broke the news that he was going to commit her to Bergen Pines, a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey. She flew into a frenzy at the prospect of being sent to what she viewed as a prison. Finally, a doctor came to the house to administer a sedative. John Jr. was only seventeen at the time he witnessed the confrontation.
    The next morning, John Jr. was the last person to speak to his mother before she climbed into her year-old Buick and drove one hundred miles north along the Hudson River, crossing into New York State. She found a scenic overlook not far from the West Point Academy, and pulled off the road.
    The river splashed over granite boulders, and had, over time, carved deep slices into the rock cliffs that supported the Palisades Parkway. Dense vegetation of every description—tall pines, huge leafy oaks, and wildflowers—covered the hilly terrain and trailed down to the water’s edge. Surrounded by all this beauty, she stepped out of her car and walked almost fifty feet. As she stared down at the pounding river, she pulled out a 9-millimeter German Mauser. Placing it to her right temple, she squeezed the trigger. She dropped to the pine needle-covered ground, falling on top of the gun. The Palisades Parkway Police found her lifeless body at 2:15 P.M.
    A note in her pocket described the depression that had caused the young mother to take her own life, leaving five children behind.
    Gossip suggested that John Sr. was terribly abusive to Julia and that he contributed to her mental problems. In any event, their mother’s suicide shattered the family so severely that some family members still don’t speak. John, more than his brothers and sisters, was particularly depressed and subject to explosive mood swings. At times he blamed himself. Could he have said something during those last few moments when he had spoken with her? Could he have been more sympathetic? Could he have changed her mind? To relieve his nagging guilt, he threw himself into his studies and graduated from high school in just three years.
     
     
    A year later, John’s father remarried. His new wife, a woman named Kathy, was a statuesque blonde. She brought an additional son into the family, whom John Sr. immediately adopted.
    In a family of six children supported by a sole breadwinner, no one expected to be sent to an exclusive Ivy League school or given money for an expensive dorm or apartment. So, while still living with his family in Dumont, John Jr. began attending one of the four extensions of Fairleigh