J. K. Rowling Would Have Loved My Grandparents

A few months ago I watched a Biography documentary about J. K. Rowling which included an interview in which she mentioned that parents sometimes write to her complaining that her books are too scary for children. I had to smile and could only wish that the creator of Harry Potter had known my paternal grandparents. She would have hit it off with our family beautifully - as far as Grandma and Grandpa Bowen and I were concerned, there was no such thing as something which was too scary.

Whodunit?

They had always been doting grandparents but their interest in me began to really perk when they saw that I enjoyed reading. Patiently, they observed me eagerly plow through the Oz books, Black Beauty and Little Women. Things began to gain momentum when they noticed my interest in Nancy Drew. Yes, the time for initiation had arrived when I was about nine and my grandparents introduced me to one of their great secret guilty pleasures ... true crime magazines.

You know, those cheap trashy pulp "slasher rags" which always featured on their front cover a curvaceous, scantily clad girl being threatened by a menacing shadow or a sinister black-clad hand reaching out in a way that bode no good. In the back of the magazine would be a grim gallery of bondage equipment and handcuffs but in between those and the cover were that month's gallery of true crimes, plucked from the headlines of the day. Before we had Ann Rule, this was what some of the most intellectual true crime addicts were devouring.

My Mom had died during the summer of 1950 and even though I was in boarding school, I still ended up spending a lot of time in Villa Park with Grandma and Grandpa. Grandpa would bring home a true crime issue on Friday night and when we were assembled in their den, he would choose a story and read to a certain point, then mark that place with his pen and hand the issue to Grandma who would repeat the process and hand it over to me. We were all honor-bound not to read beyond Grandpa's mark on the page.

Then the three of us would put the magazine aside and discuss the case - weighing all the factors, the personalities of the primary suspects, forensic detail, you name it - until we had taken an educated guess as to whodunit. We would each in turn read the rest of the story and danged if we weren't usually right in our initial conclusions. Little did the gentle nuns who eagerly provided wholesome things for me to read at school know what I was building my vocabulary on with my grandparents. While the other kids struggled to spell "nevertheless" and "Mississippi," I was nailing words like "strangulation" and "autopsy." I knew about Estimated Time of Death, BOLO's, A/K/A's and bullet trajectories. I'm telling you, I must have had the coolest pair of grandparents a kid could have wished for.

We would end our Friday evening sessions the same way. Grandpa would cook a big pot of hot chocolate "from scratch" with unsweetened cocoa, delightful fattening whole milk, sugar and a dash of salt. As we sipped from our mugs before bedtime, we would discuss more bucolic subjects such as things my grandparents used to do when they were young or people they had known back then - even news events or jokes which had been popular in the old days. It is in great part due to this willingness to share that I think our family always had such an avid interest in history. As the hot chocolate did its work and we relaxed, the intellectual quotient in our chat would drop a notch or two to "I wonder why they call them MARSHmallows," a mystery we never did solve.

The Outcome

I guess it is amazing that we didn't end up being warped somehow by the crappy things we were reading but if the truth be known, we never branched off into homicidal careers of our own. Aside from being fascinating, those true crime stories (some surprisingly well written) illustrated just how sad real crime can be - a lesson we never forgot. My grandparents were good to me and I pray that they are in Heaven today ... and that God is letting them watch the CSI shows on television!