I don't often think back to a frightening time in my family’s life, when as a child, my innocence was shattered and I was made to face the fact that there were evil people in the world that wanted to hurt me, as well as the people I loved. I cannot convey the horror of those days in my past because I was only six years old and some thirty-two years later parts of what I remember and what Mom told us, seem almost humorous now.

My slightly older sister and I, were being raised by my Mom, a single mother, in a small two-story apartment called Sunset Ridge. It was a modest complex between Alamo Heights and Terrell Hills. My Mother a very beautiful woman in her late twenties had her admirers but was a good mother who concerned herself with the raising of her children.
Not long after moving to the apartment my mother noticed a strange man that seemed to be watching her. One afternoon, coming home from her job at Kens ch.5, she was driving past the front of the complex heading for the carport in the rear, when she noticed a strange man out front, skipping down the sidewalk in a very fruity manor.

When she drove past he skipped up to a bush and squatted as if to try and hide from her. He was abnormally thin to the point of skeletal and to make matters worse very tall, with thick black rimmed glasses and a flock of greasy, unkempt black hair. His bony knees literally stuck up over his head as he squatted behind the tiny sparse bush that offered no concealment. He peered at Mom back and forth alternating from each side of the bush. She soon found out from neighbors that he was an eye doctor and was generally thought of as equally odd by all she spoke to.
####One night, while reading alone in her bed, my mother heard a noise at the window. My sister and I were asleep upstairs. My mother stood up on her bed, pulled the curtains aside and there was the skipper, his face pressed against the class, peering in at my mother with an evil, insane grinning smile on his twisted face.
My mother ran to the entryway, near the stairs and watched in horror as she saw the doorknob begin to turn and rattle. The skipper was trying to get in. She called to no one upstairs “Carl, some ones trying to get in the apartment. Get the gun.” My fathers name was Carl as well, though he was not there and we were all alone. Mom breathed a sigh of relief when she heard the footsteps running away from the door.
The next day my mother told my sister and I about the Skipper and told us to stay away from him. She didn't know that he had already approached us several times and we had even gotten into his car once. He liked to drive the neighborhood children around the block. Looking back I realize how innocent I was and how innocent those days in the 1960s were. We moved shortly after that and Mom married a Disc Jockey from WOAI.
We never forgot, The night of ...The Skipper.