Making Waves. Chris Epting

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      The men’s voices grew louder and louder as they told my mother in no uncertain terms that they were going to call the police and have my father arrested.

      As relieved as I was that this was happening, I was also growing sick to my stomach at the thought of the other children he had touched. Had he molested my friends? Who had been in my garage? What had he done to them? I thought back to all of those times when he had filmed my friends at our backyard pool parties with his home movie camera. Why had he taken such a special interest in them?

      Never in my life had I imagined that he was doing this to other children. How many lives had he ruined? How many people had he destroyed?

      After a few minutes, the men left. My mother closed the door slowly and didn’t say a word to me. My brothers had been in their rooms, and hadn’t seen the confrontation. I didn’t say a word to her, because I knew there was nothing I could say. Reality had finally slammed her right in the face, and she was going to have to deal with it. I walked to my room quietly and went to bed.

      The next morning, there was another knock at the front door. I watched my mother open the door and saw two policemen and a policewoman standing outside.

      “Your husband has been arrested for child molestation,” the policewoman told my mom.

      My mother didn’t react, so the policewoman repeated that my father had been arrested.

      My mother seemed to come out of her daze. “But my dad is a pastor,” she said. “My dad is a pastor.”

      The policewoman was confused. “Ma’am, we’re not talking about your dad. We are talking about your husband.”

      To this day, I’m not quite sure what my mother meant by that. On the one hand, it seems like she was suggesting that her father might be able to help with the situation. On the other hand, knowing what my extended family was like and how strict and unforgiving everyone was, I suppose she also may have been scared about how her father might react to all of this.

      The police asked her a few more questions, took some notes, and then left. They must have arrested my father at work, I remember thinking. But he was never really in prison for what he did. It was like a furlough program. He could still go to work each day, but as I understood it, he would return to some kind of minimum detention facility at night. As I remember, after a year or two, he came back home. Back in the early ’70s, these kinds of crimes just weren’t dealt with the way they are today.

      A few days after my father was taken in, on the way home from swim practice, we stopped at the McDonald’s in Norwalk, where we often had dinner. As we were waiting in line to order our food, a man who was eating at a table started looking at us with a peculiar expression on his face.

      He stood up and approached us, looking us up and down. When he finally finished studying my mother’s face he raised his hand and pointed a finger at her.

      “Her husband has been molesting all of your daughters!” the man shouted, so that the whole restaurant could hear him. “All of the young girls in this town were victims of her husband. Her husband is a monster. Her husband has been molesting all of our little girls!”

      Immediately, the people standing near us in line started backing away. It was a busy night at the restaurant, and it felt like everyone in the place was backing away from us. There were looks of horror on everyone’s faces as they stared at my mother and me and my brothers. People started saying things and yelling at my mother. It was starting to feel dangerous.

      Quickly, my mother hustled us out of the restaurant and into the car. As we left the McDonald’s, I can still remember the yelling of the angry mob behind us. If there had been a bunch of people with pitchforks and torches at our house that night, I would not have been surprised.

      It was time for us to leave Norwalk. Thanks to my father, we were now being treated like lepers. With my dad incarcerated, my mom made plans to find a place for us to live where no one in the whole town would know who we were.

      At the time, I didn’t have too much time to think about all of this. I had a race coming up that would help me escape the madness. The moment I had always dreamed of—the opportunity to get away from the pain of my family—had finally arrived.

       CHAPTER THREE

       My First Adventure

      Shortly after I turned fourteen, my coach, Flip, came over to me at practice one day and said, “Shirley, you’ve qualified again for the 1971 Short Course Nationals!” This one would be held that spring in Pullman, Washington.

      I swam the 500-yard freestyle against the well-known swimmer Debbie Meyer, who was my hero back then. Between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, she was simply “the world’s greatest female swimmer,” according to the International Swimming Hall of Fame. At the 1968 Olympic Games, Debbie was the first female swimmer to win three individual gold medals at a single Olympic Games. She did so by earning the top spot in the 200, 400, and 800 freestyle events. She was named “World Swimmer of the Year” three times, and was given the James E. Sullivan Award in 1968.

      I didn’t know that Debbie would be retiring within just a year, at only eighteen years of age. I was a little freaked out that I was actually going to compete against her. After I did my flip turn during the 500-yard freestyle, I looked around and saw that I was actually ahead. How could this be? I was beating Debbie Meyer? That moment of realization may have cost me the race; Debbie overcame the lead and wound up winning the race. But it didn’t matter. I knew I was getting better overall.

      Before we left Pullman, my mom and I were both sitting on the empty bleachers surrounding the pool. I noticed that she was upset, but I didn’t really understand how mad she was until she opened her mouth. “Maybe one day, you’ll be able to tell your grandchildren you went to the Olympic Trials,” she said to me.

      I was happy with how I had done, but she sure wasn’t. She was incredibly disappointed. She was suggesting that I would never get past the Olympic Trials (which would be held the following year in advance of the Munich Olympics). I knew right then and there that she really had no clue about what I was as a swimmer. My times were getting better every day. With every competition, I was growing stronger. I had done well and was proud of myself, but she didn’t get it. In her narrow-minded view of swimming, if you hadn’t won, you had failed. She had no concept of the growth curve that I was beginning to experience. I was swimming so well, but she couldn’t see any of it.

      After swimming in Pullman, I started hearing about international trips that the best swimmers got to take as part of the American team. In the back of my head, I started to put together what I would have to do to be a part of such a thing.

      That summer, I qualified for the Long Course Nationals, which were to be held in Houston. My mom and I flew down there together, and I was entered in all four distances in the freestyle races.

      I swam very well in my first couple of races. The next day, there was a knock on our hotel room door. My mom opened it, and there was my coach, Flip. He came into our room and sat down in a chair by the desk.

      “Okay, so here’s what’s happening,” he said, calm as usual. “Shirley can make the international team. All she needs to do tomorrow is get either first or second place in the 100 or, if she wins the 1,500, that will do it, too.”

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