Manifest Injustice Read Online Free PDF Page B

his black-and-blue shoulder. That October, when squirrel season opened, his dad took him to the Sanger farm, which featured two large patches of timber chock-full of fat juicy fox squirrels. Bill bagged four of them, his dad six. The next month, at the start of pheasant season, Harold took the whole family to Fred Wessles’s farm outside of DeWitt, Iowa, where Bill brought down his first ring-necked pheasant. Back home, Harold bragged to all the neighbors, and his dad’s pride meant the world to Bill.
    By junior high school, he already stood six foot seven, which served him well on the basketball and football teams but set him apart from his classmates. In high school he continued to play despite a crowded schedule—he also was on the student council and had a job at the new service station his father had opened in the spring of 1950, a forty-five-minute bus commute from school. On weekends Bill worked fourteen-hour days there alongside his dad. Despite their efforts, the station, really a twenty-four-hour truck stop, did not do well, and they struggled to keep it going. Together they traveled to Lincoln, Nebraska, to woo large trucking companies, but the only one they won over, a produce operation, ran up large charges it couldn’t pay. In the fall of 1952, when Bill was seventeen, Harold filed for bankruptcy. You have to accept the bad with the good, he reminded his son. Harold quickly landed a fine job with a car dealership in Davenport, and Bill began working nights at a dairy company, where he washed the delivery trucks, rarely finishing before 11:00 P.M. Both also joined the Ground Observer Corps, which, as part of the country’s national civil defense system, watched the skies for large multiengine aircraft.
    The next summer, the Macumber clan drove to Arizona to visit relatives. Bill loved the high desert and the mountains, the smell of orange blossoms, the sway of real palm trees, and he celebrated when his father decided to move the family to Phoenix. There Harold found work as a mechanic and—with Bill’s contribution—bought a home on West Highland Avenue. Bill could not land a job, though, so after searching for half a year, he decided to enlist. On Valentine’s Day 1955, he was sworn into the U.S. Army and sent off to Fort Ord for basic training. There he got to shake hands with the commanding general after becoming one of only eight men ever to fire a perfect score on rifle qualification. They offered him the chance to attend Officer Candidate School, but he declined, not sure he wanted to enlist for another two years. In the spring of 1957, his tour of duty over, he returned to his parents’ home in Phoenix. He and Harold began working together at Firestone Tire on North Central Avenue, where they ran the brake and front end department. In May 1960 they once again went into business for themselves, opening a new filling station on the corner of Twelfth Street and Missouri.
    That year Bill met the woman who would become his wife. Carol Kempfert was dating his brother Robert at the time, Bob still in the army then, stationed down at Fort Huachuca. Bob Macumber and Carol Kempfert were part of a group: four servicemen and their high school girls, teenagers infatuated with men in uniform. They all liked to party and drink—sometimes running liquor up from Mexico—but Bob quickly realized that he didn’t click with Carol. She felt like flypaper to him—too close, too demanding. When he told her they were done, she started dating Bill, still living at his parents’ house. He was twenty-five and not overly experienced with women. Growing up, he’d worked most of the time, rarely going out on dates. Even his brother had to allow that Bill, gangly and angular, wasn’t real handsome. Being so tall didn’t help, either. Back in Iowa during his senior year at high school, there’d been one girl Bill truly loved, an accomplished pianist who often accompanied him when he sang somewhere. They once made a