“My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.”
- Clarence Budinton Kelland
Life goes a full circle. The tutelage of a child starts when his parents are born. We hold a set of values that we wish to pass onto our children. But are we conforming to those values ourselves?
A father and his two sons, aged 10 and 6,went to a counter to buy tickets for the theme park. The person selling the tickets told the father, “Children under 5 don’t need a ticket. The younger one is 6 but barely looks 5. So, you take two tickets instead of three.”The father answered, “Right now, it will cost me 10 dollars less. If I tell a lie today, 10 years down the line, it will cost me my son.”
For most of his life,William Ginglen, a former Marine, was a true pillar of his community and a stickler for obeying the law. His three grown up sons—Jared, Garrett and Clay—fondly remember him saying, “If you ever get into trouble with the police, you better hope they get to you, before I do.”
In recent years, he’d lost his job and seemed to be in a downward spiral. He was in a lot of debt and often asked his sons for money, but they never said “no”.
On August 19, 2004, Jared, a police officer, read a story in the paper about a series of armed bank robberies in another part of the state.Hewas jolted to see that the description of the suspect just oddly matched his father.
At first, he could not believe his eyes and rubbished his suspicion.
But as Jared continued reading, he noticed that the newspaper story referenced a website set up by local police authorities that contained surveillance photos of one of the robberies. “Just to clear up my own mind, I thought I’d go look and make sure that it wasn’t him,” Jared said. “But it was him. My father was the robber.”
Distressed by the revelation, Jared called his brother, Garrett. To make sure that Garrett was not influenced by his own suspicions, Jared simply asked his brother to look at the police website.
When they were sure that the man in the photo was their father, the three brothers agreed to confront him about their suspicions.
However, when they arrived, William was not at home. They felt that the severity of the crimes made any delay in their action irresponsible. In such fretful turn of events, they made the toughest decision of their lives. They immediately contacted the local police.
When police searched William’s home, they found the evidence they needed to prove he was the criminal in the surveillance photos. They also found a journal that outlined a "secret" life, filled with marital infidelities and the use of drugs like crack cocaine.
William’s secret behavior cemented the brothers’ belief that they’d acted correctly.
“To find out he had this double life going on, was what angered me the most.” Jared said.
William was sentenced to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to seven bank robberies.
Recently, the story featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show where the brothers spoke to their father for the first time after the incident.William could talk from the jail itself through satellite.
When William came to know that it was his sons who turned him in, he was angered. “Had I been a serial killer or a pedophile, they could have done this. I just robbed banks because I needed money.”
When asked if they regretted their decision, the brothers said, “It really wasn’t a choice. It was just what we had to do.The irony is that this is what we learned from our father as kids. He made it very clear to us that you always have to tell the truth, no matter what. The best part is that you don’t even have to remember it.”
This is not an isolated story. All of us have, atsome point or the other, purchased tickets in black, bribed someone in order to get our job done faster, tampered with electricity bills, not paid the correct income tax, used “approach” to get things done. We say that, “This is a way of life now.”, “We alone can not change anything.”, “After all we are doing this for our kids.”
We must not forget that what we are, teaches our children far more, than what we say to them. No matter what our misdeed is, it has a lasting impact on our kids. Every criminal has his own justifications. But do we think our children don’t know? Will we ever be able to reason with our kids? Will our children ever forgive us? What do we want our children to tell their children about us? We want our children to make us proud by their actions. But have we ever asked ourselves if we are making our kids proud by our actions? Why the deafening silence?
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