Honesty and openness served him well, and by the time Glenn was thirty, he was making seventy thousand dollars a year selling insurance. He had a house in the suburbs on the far side of Rose Hill, with four bedrooms, a huge deck, and a white fence that ran all the way around the yard. There was peewee football with his oldest son, Indian Guides with his middle boy, and his infant daughter to hold in his arms in the still of the night and wonder at the miracle of life. His wife tended to use the smoke alarm for her cooking timer, so Glenn often prepared the evening meals, too. He took his boys with him everywhere: on errands to the gas station or the grocery store, and almost every Saturday to the garage where he rebuilt the hot rod cars he liked to race. He even had a big happy dog named Maggie. The boys would run around with her in the neatly trimmed backyard while Glenn laughed from his big back porch and turned the burgers on the grill.
On Sunday, they went to church. Not a new-style megachurch but an old-fashioned church in a building that was beautiful for its simplicity and modesty. The services were no-frills, and the community was so small, Glenn became the Sunday school teacher for every kid in the congregation, from toddler to twelfth grade. Only three boys were interested in the basketball team, so Glenn recruited a few kids from the neighborhood, who turned out to be a Sioux City melting pot of Greek, African American, and Native American, and told them they could play basketball as long as they attended church every Sunday. Those boys became Glenn’s extended family, too. There was nothing, Glenn Albertson would have said, that hard work and a good attitude and genuine love couldn’t solve.
And then his daughter Kari got a fever.
She was only six months old, and the girls in Sunday school loved to hold her. It was a typical bone-cold winter Sunday, all fifteen kids running ragged, when one of the girls came over to Glenn and said, “Kari’s hot.”
Glenn felt his baby’s head. It was burning. “I’m taking her home,” he said.
He trundled the boys into the car and started up Rose Hill. It was snowing heavily, and the world was hazy and white. Coming around the last corner, Glenn could barely make out the vehicle blocking his driveway. He pulled around to the front, tucked his daughter deep into a blanket, and ran her up to the door.
He couldn’t reach his keys with his daughter in his arms, so he rang the doorbell. His wife was home sick, so she should have been able to let them in, but she didn’t answer.
He rang again. The boys were at his side, shivering in their heavy jackets. He pulled the blanket close around his daughter. No answer.
He rang. And rang. And rang.
Finally, the door opened. It wasn’t his wife. It was one of his best friends.
“Where’s my wife?” he said.
“She’s in the shower,” his friend said.
The marriage was over at that very moment. The trust—the bedrock of Glenn’s existence—was gone. He hung around for a few months, never talked about what had happened, but the white fence and the four-bedroom house and the happy life had all dissolved into the cold of that snowy Sunday morning.
They got divorced. He moved out of the house and into a bachelor apartment, hardly a stick of furniture in the place. Soon after, he arrived early at the insurance office, to discover that his key no longer worked. His former in-laws had changed the locks.
He went back to what he knew. His father-in-law had filed to have Glenn’s insurance license revoked, so Glenn spent his days underneath cars, managing the service department at an auto dealership. He spent his nights on Lower Fourth Street, working as a bouncer and a bartender down the block from the place where his dad held court with a bottle in his hand. The second job was for the attorney’s fees to fight for custody of his children, but in the early 1970s, in Sioux City, Iowa, fathers weren’t considered rightful parents. He lost his kids, except for Sunday visitation. He lost his house. He lost his dog. He had a lot of friends, but he lost most of them in the divorce, too. He hated explaining himself, he said; he’d rather be alone. A stray cat, Chloe, showed up at his apartment and kept him company. She was a bit standoffish, but she’d curl up in his lap sometimes. Not all the time, but every now and then.
About a year later, Glenn’s oldest boy called him on a Saturday afternoon. That was rare. His boys didn’t talk to him much anymore.
“Mom’s drinking,” the boy said in his small child’s voice. “There are motorcycles in the yard.”
Glenn jumped in his car. When he pulled up at his former house, he saw four motorcycles on the lawn and a few more on the sidewalk. A biker stepped out of the front door and said, “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m her ex-husband,” Glenn said, standing in the middle of the yard.
“Then you better go.”
“I’m just here for my kids.”
A couple more bikers stepped onto the porch. Two of them stepped down to the lawn. “I don’t want any rash judgments,” Glenn said, holding out his empty hands. “There are children in that house, and I just want them safe.”
There was a kid’s baseball bat lying in the grass. Glenn didn’t notice it until one of the bikers picked it up and stepped toward him. When he started to swing, Glenn didn’t run. Instead, he stepped in, ripped the bat from the biker’s hand, and brought it down on the man’s knee. His friends leapt off the porch. If there had been one more of them, or if they’d been sober, Glenn might have been in trouble. But as a bouncer, he knew how to handle drunks. Before he had time to think, a second biker was on the ground with a dislocated elbow, and the other two were kicking their rides into gear. Glenn threw down the baseball bat, walked into his old house, retrieved his children, and drove them back to his apartment.
Three hours later, a policeman knocked on his door. It was an officer Glenn knew from his days in training.
Glenn told him the story. The policeman said, “Well, Glenn, that’s fine, but her parents are there now, and you need to take those kids home, because there’s a kidnapping charge filed against you.”
After that, life in Sioux City became unbearable for Glenn Albertson.
One day, when he was still working for his father-in-law’s insurance business, an older man had stopped Glenn on the street. “Just wanted to tell you, young man,” he said, checking out Glenn’s suit, “that you look pretty sharp. You got a minute?”
“Yes, I do,” Glenn said.
They sat down together. The man was filthy and disheveled, wearing a tattered cream-colored suit. His shoes hadn’t been shined in a long, long time.
“I used to be a banker,” the older man said, handing Glenn a business card. It read VICE PRESIDENT, FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF CHICAGO. “My father was a banker, and his father was a banker before him. Everyone I associated with was a banker. That’s all I knew. But when the Depression hit, my bank went under. I lost my job.” Glenn nodded and waited.
“What do you do, young man?”
“I sell insurance.”
“Well, I’m going to tell you something in case that doesn’t work out for you: Learn as much about as many things as you can, because that way you will never have trouble finding a job.”