Death Row Chaplain: Unbelievable True Stories from America's Most Notorious Prison - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Rev. Earl Smith became the youngest chaplain ever hired by the California Department of Corrections when he was asked to become the chaplain at San Quentin in 1983. In 2000, Earl was named National Correctional Chaplain of the Year. He currently serves as chaplain for the San Francisco 49ers and the Golden State Warriors. He has appeared on HBO, CNN, The 700 Club, Trinity Broadcasting and the Discovery Channel, and has been featured in Newsweek and Time. He was born and raised in Stockton, California, where he lives today with his wife, Angel, and their children Ebony, Earl Jr., Tamara, and Franklin.

Mark Schlabach is the coauthor of the New York Times bestselling books, Happy, Happy, Happy, Si-cology 1, and The Duck Commander Family. He is one of the most respected and popular college football columnists in the country. He and his wife live in Madison, Georgia, with their three children.

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Death Row Chaplain

1

Fighting for Acceptance

LOOKING BACK, I REALIZE NOW that a career in prison ministry probably appealed to me because I wasn’t much different from the inmates. In many ways, I was very much like the men and women whom society has cast aside for their crimes and mistakes. When I was younger, I wanted only what many of them are seeking: acceptance, attention, and love.

I came into the world fighting for acceptance, really from the day my parents brought me home from the hospital after my birth on January 29, 1956. I grew up on the east side of Stockton, California. We had a small house on Scotts Street, where I lived with my parents, Addie and Curtis Smith, and my sisters, Betty Jo and Sylvia, and brother, Curtis. My mother was a very peculiar person, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that she didn’t love me. I figured out that the best thing I could do was stay out of her sight.

When I was four years old, I was sitting in our living room with my mother and some of her friends. A newborn baby was sitting on one of the women’s laps. I realized the bottle was empty. “That baby ain’t got no milk,” I said.

All of a sudden, my mother turned and slapped me across the face. “Shut up, fool!” she shouted.

I was a little kid, so I didn’t know that babies sometimes suck on the nipples of empty bottles to pacify them. I was only trying to help, but my mother embarrassed me in front of her friends. Unfortunately, it is one of the most indelible memories of my childhood. It seemed like every time I tried to get close to my mother, something happened to push me away.

A Great Friend: Ossie

I realized when I was very young that my mother was always going to give the love and affection I so desired to someone else. Fortunately, my parents had hired an older woman, Ossie Pittsfield, to care for me when I was a baby. On the day my parents brought me home from the hospital, my mother handed me over to Ossie. She knew that I needed love, and she gave me every ounce of affection she had. She was one of the most influential people in my life, because she taught me how to love others. In many ways, Ossie rescued me from what would have been an otherwise miserable childhood.

Ossie lived in our house. I slept in a bedroom with her, she fed and bathed me, and spent more time with me than my mother ever did. On special occasions, I rode the bus with Ossie to visit her brother Roy, who worked as a porter on a train that came through town a couple of times a year. She packed Roy a big lunch, and we spent a few hours with him at the train station until he left for another adventure.

When I was six or seven years old, I came home from school and Ossie wasn’t there. My mother told me she had sent her packing. I was devastated and so angry. I went door to door in our neighborhood, frantically searching for Ossie, even though my mother had warned me not to do so. I found her living at a friend’s house a couple of blocks away; she’d rented a room there so she would be close enough to check on me. When my mother found out I’d been looking for Ossie, she spanked me for disobeying her. It didn’t stop me from going back to Ossie’s house the next day and many days thereafter.

In many ways, it was at this point in my life at which I stopped caring. If my mother was determined to take away the person who mattered most to me, I didn’t think there was much in the world worth living for. From that point forward, I took a turn for the worse and rebelled against my parents and any other authority figures.

As I grew older, though, I began to realize that my mother was incapable of loving me. I’ve learned over the years that, if people know better, they typically do better. I don’t think my mother had the capacity to raise me. When I was older, I learned that my mother had been married to another man when she was very young; he had been physically abusive. My mother ran away from him and his family and fled from Texas to California with her mother. My mom wasn’t even sixteen years old at the time.

After she married my father, I was the youngest of their four children and, by the time I was born, my mother apparently wasn’t interested in raising another child. I hated my mother then for not loving me, but she didn’t know any better. She gave whatever love she had to my older brother, which made me resent her even more and made me very envious of Curtis. At the age of fifteen, Curtis fathered a child, and I watched as my mother poured all of her love and affection on my nephew.

A Good Dad

I was much closer to my father, who loved me and was my protector. My father was the man of the house, and when he was home my mother tended to leave me alone. My father was born in Horatio, Arkansas, and served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After being discharged from the Navy, he worked for twenty-eight years at the Sharpe Army Depot near Lathrop, California, which is a military distribution and storage facility. My father often had three jobs at once to make ends meet, as he also worked as a mechanic and at a local cannery. He was president of the local American Federation of Government Employees union, which gave him a tremendous amount of pride and power. Politicians would come to our house to talk with my father about getting votes. The majority whip in the U.S. Congress, John McFall, was one of his closest associates.

Even though my dad wasn’t home much, he still found time to serve as my Scoutmaster in the Boy Scouts and coach my Little League Baseball teams. He taught me how to fish and hunt. My dad was the superintendent of our Sunday school, and a choir director and trustee at our church. He instilled the importance of education in my siblings and me from an early age. My father was a high school graduate, took a lot of courses from the University of California–Berkeley, and even taught courses on labor relations. He made sure every one of his children did well in school and knew what was happening in the world. He made each of us read the newspaper and to have a report ready for him when he got home. Eventually, all of his children earned college degrees.

One of the most frightening episodes of my childhood was when my father was hospitalized for nearly a month. I was around twelve and too young to realize it at the time, but my father was an alcoholic. I had seen him drinking, but it grew progressively worse. My father had ulcers on his liver, and surgeons had to intervene. It seemed that his entire body was poisoned by alcohol. I was devastated that my dad wasn’t home. My mother wouldn’t take me to the hospital to see him, so I called him every night to make sure he was okay.

One day, I persuaded one of our neighbors, Mr. Holloway, whom the neighborhood kids called “Old Dude,” to take me to see my dad at the hospital. I brought along our family dog, Duke, an enormous German shepherd. My dad loved Duke and took him nearly everywhere he went. He often put Duke in the front seat of his car and put a hat on his head, so that all the kids in our neighborhood would see him.

When Mr. Holloway took Duke and me to the hospital to see my dad, I walked up to the window of his first-floor room. I put Duke’s paws on the windowsill and knocked on the glass. My dad saw us and started crying. I didn’t know it, but the doctors had told my dad he probably wasn’t going to live. When I later heard my mother talking to her friends about my dad’s...