The Mad Sculptor (10 page)

Typical of some early Pentecostals—who, placing the love of Christ above all else, “virtually abandoned regular family life to follow the Lord”
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—Mary was increasingly neglectful of her children. “Her religion was the consolation from all the woes that flesh is heir
to,” Irwin would recall. “Though affectionate in her way, she was wedded to God’s mission and with this absorbing interest she became…oblivious of our growing needs. So we were reared in squalor, under-nourished, poorly clothed and our housing was merely a shelter. Our life was drab, insecure, deprived of the natural life of the normal child. Mother had her religious emotions to sustain her, while we had but empty stomachs to go to bed on.”
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With their mother otherwise occupied, her sons found themselves free to run wild.

Wildest of all was Vidalin, a textbook delinquent clearly marked for a criminal future. A real-life version of the stereotypical street toughs Sidney Kingsley would depict in
Dead End
, he began smoking at the age of eight and was soon up to forty cigarettes a day. At nine, he was hanging around neighborhood pool halls. By ten, he was engaged in petty theft, stealing pigeons from their sidewalk coops outside of local butcher shops and selling them for twenty-five cents a pair.

His serious troubles began at the age of eleven when he entered sixth grade and befriended a young hoodlum named Gale Wing. Two years his senior, Wing had already been arrested once for stealing copper wire from the city’s Bureau of Power and Light, burning off the insulation, and selling it to an unlicensed junk dealer for ten cents a pound. He was also the leader of the self-styled “Pasadena Avenue Gang,” a bunch of juvenile miscreants described by one social worker as “a menace to the neighborhood.” Inducted into the gang, Vidalin was soon skipping school to join them in their criminal escapades—mostly housebreaking, petty larceny, and the occasional theft of an automobile, which was either abandoned after a wild joyride or dismantled and sold to shady dealers in used car parts.
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On the evening of August 24, 1917—two months past his fourteenth birthday—Vidalin was arrested for the first time. Loitering outside the Sunbeam Theater on Pasadena Avenue with a couple of pals, he began pelting moviegoers with handfuls of gravel as they emerged from a showing of the William S. Hart horse opera,
The Gun Fighter
. Unfortunately for Vidalin, the police station was directly across the street. Charged with truancy and public nuisance, he was given probation, which he promptly violated by playing hooky during the day and “loafing on the streets late at night.” In the first week of October, upon the petition of his mother, he was declared a ward of the court and sentenced to the Whittier State School until the age of twenty-one.
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While awaiting transfer to the reform school, he was confined to Juvenile Hall, the short-term detention center for delinquents (equivalent to county jail for adults). Within days, he and a trio of fellow inmates had engineered an escape, using a chisel stolen from the woodworking shop. Caught in San Bernardino and returned to his cell, he escaped again less than two weeks later, this time making his way to Tijuana, where—according to a doubtful yarn he told to one social worker—he “won fifty dollars gambling with two Mexicans.” He was picked up in Oceanside a week later and brought back to Juvenile Hall, where he promptly found himself in trouble for stealing a sweater from another boy.
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He was finally admitted to Whittier in September 1918. In a published report on the remedial goals of the reform school, Superintendent Fred C. Nelles explained that its inmates “could be divided into three groups”: “those who are feeble-minded,” those “of sound mind whose delinquency is associated with some form of misunderstanding or neglect,” and “those who wrong-doing has become habitual and who are intentionally, deliberately, and willfully guilty of misconduct.”
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From the start, it was clear that Vidalin Irwin fell into the last category.

Interviewed upon admission by the resident psychologist, a Dr. Hoag, the fifteen-year-old delinquent crowed about his criminal exploits, boasting that he had committed as many as twenty “housebreaking jobs” on his own and another ten with fellow members of the Pasadena Avenue Gang and had once netted $150—roughly $2,500 in today’s money—from robbing a grocery store in Alhambra. To gauge his ethical development, Hoag posed a hypothetical question: “If you were walking along the street and there was no one
in sight except a man in front of you who, in pulling out his handkerchief, dropped a ten-dollar bill, what would you do?” Without hesitation, Vidalin replied: “I would be inclined to put the money to my own use.”

Hoag was impressed with Vidalin’s intelligence, describing him as “one of the brightest boys he had ever examined.” At the same time, the psychologist found him “unmanageable,” “quarrelsome,” “deceitful,” and “possibly psychopathic,” with “blunted moral reactions.”
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His diagnosis was quickly confirmed by Vidalin’s behavior. Within weeks of his arrival, he was sent to Whittier’s penal farm for “disobedience, refusal to work, refusal to answer when spoken to, and a determination not to succeed.” After thirty-one days, he was returned to the general population, only to be banished again a mere five days later for an attempted escape. On January 29, 1919, just nine days after his release, he hurled a stone at a boy named Charles Smith and was returned to the penal farm, where he remained until February 17. After a few months of relative calm, he was charged with participating in a plot to attack the watchman with a baseball bat. This time, he earned a stint in a lightless solitary confinement cell, euphemistically known as “the rest room.” By the time he was freed from the penal farm on July 22, he had secured his reputation as one of the reform school’s most incorrigible cases.
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Taking his big brother as role model, Pember—the youngest of the three Irwin boys—began running afoul of the law at the age of nine. Possessed of both a superior IQ and a variety of nervous disorders—one social worker described him as a nail biter and bed wetter, with “spasmodic twitching of the eyelids” and other tics—he was first arrested in July 1918 after snatching a change purse from a playmate and running off to Eastlake Park, where he spent the money riding the miniature railroad and visiting the nearby alligator farm. Owing to his “persistent thefts and disobedience of his mother,” he was committed to Juvenile Hall, where he remained until the following April, when he was placed in the foster home of a family named Canty. Two months later, he ran away. Turned in by
his mother, he was sent to the Strickland Home for Boys, a five-acre farm on the northern fringe of Los Angeles, converted into a refuge for wayward youths. Its stated aim was to promote character development in its troubled young charges—a worthy endeavor that, in the case of Pember Irwin, would prove entirely futile.
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Though his criminal notoriety would, in the end, far exceed that of his brothers, Fenelon was the least ungovernable of the three as a young child. Often, while the other two were out looking for trouble, he “stayed at home…to help his mother with the housework.”
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Studious and exceptionally bright, he did so well upon entering school that he skipped second grade. He was, from his earliest years, a voracious reader. Eventually, he would devour every book on the family shelves, beginning with Plutarch’s
Lives
, Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
, and—his favorite—François Guizot’s
A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times
.
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Before he reached ten, however, he was beginning to show signs of disturbance. At school, he grew “more unruly, less attentive, and developed a tendency to truancy.” Later, he would blame his problems on his “growing class consciousness”—his shameful realization that he “was more poorly clothed than his fellow students, had worse shoes and sometimes no shoes at all, and had no lunch while they were all furnished with lunch by their families.” He was also prone to violent outbursts of temper and—though not particularly big for his age—gained a reputation as a fearsome fighter, ready to “beat the tar” out of anyone who “got fresh” with him.
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He began fighting with his mother, too, mostly over religion. He resented her demand that he study at least three chapters of scripture every night when he preferred reading dime novel Westerns, Hugo’s
Les Misérables
, and the stories of Mark Twain. She also insisted that he memorize a new psalm every Sunday—a chore he found increasingly onerous and eventually refused to perform. She called him a young infidel. He told her to stop “stuffing the Bible down his throat.” Their quarrels grew increasingly bitter.
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In July 1919, less than a week before Fenelon’s twelfth birthday,
his mother filed a court petition, charging that she was unable to supervise or care for him. A few weeks later, he was committed to Juvenile Hall. “It relieved her of a heavy burden,” Irwin would bitterly recollect, “and she had more time to serve the Lord.”
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Like every new admittee to the detention center, Fenelon was given a medical exam—the first thorough checkup he had ever received. His blood sample tested positive for syphilis.

In later years, reports would circulate that the disease had been transmitted by his mother. According to these accounts, his maternal grandmother, who owned slaves in Louisiana, had mistreated one of them, a “black mammy” infected with syphilis. To get her revenge, the woman snuck into the nursery of Fenelon’s mother—still, at that time, a suckling infant—and “fed her from her black breasts.”
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This remarkably unpleasant tale has all the hallmarks of an urban legend—one of those widely credited scare stories that have more to do with lurid (and in this case racist) fantasy than historical fact. A more likely explanation, given the whoremongering hypocrite who sired him, is that Fenelon’s father was the ultimate source of the disease.

Whatever the case, the results of Fenelon’s blood test was consistent with those of his brothers. As authorities had already determined, both Vidalin and Pember Irwin, like twelve-year-old Fenelon, were afflicted with congenital syphilis.
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7

Epiphany

A
FTER THREE MONTHS IN JUVENILE HALL
, Fenelon was sent to join Pember in the Strickland Home for Boys. Not long after his arrival, he badly beat up another inmate who (so he claimed) had called him a sissy. A few days later, convinced that “the other boys there hated him,” he ran away, taking his little brother with him. Within twenty-four hours, a railroad guard found the pair sleeping in a freight car. Fenelon—indulging his dime novel fantasies—explained that he had planned to go to Montana “to fight Indians.” Returned to the Strickland Home with Pember, he continued to get embroiled in fistfights and, in March 1920, was committed to the Whittier reform school, where he was reunited with his older brother, Vidalin.

With her children now wards of the state, Mary was free to devote herself fully to her Pentecostal pursuits. By 1919, when Fenelon was sent to Juvenile Hall, she had become an acolyte of a former Azusa Street coworker, Florence L. Crawford.

A close associate of William Seymour, Mother Crawford (as she
came to be known) conducted an evangelistic campaign that took her throughout the Midwest and as far north as Winnipeg. After receiving a direct communication from God that she “establish the headquarters of her ministry in Portland, Oregon,” she repaired to the “Rose City” and began holding meetings in an old converted blacksmith shop. Her charismatic preaching quickly attracted followers from throughout the Pacific Northwest. Within a year, she had established her own church, the Apostolic Faith Mission.
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Her annual camp meetings, held in the summer and lasting as long as two months, became more elaborate by the year. A great open-walled tabernacle, surrounded by a city of tents, stood in a clearing in the woods. Adherents from as far away as Pennsylvania and New York filled every one of its 1,200 seats, wailing, weeping, and raising their hands high in prayer, while hundreds of redeemed souls hurried up to the altar to kneel in the sawdust and testify to “the great things God had done for them.” Ministers preached fiery sermons, and rousing hymns were chanted to the accompaniment of a sixty-piece orchestra—coronets, slide trombones, clarinets, saxophones, mellophones, and stringed instruments of every variety. A chartered barge, the
Bluebird
, ferried hundreds of worshippers to a nearby island for the water baptismal service.
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In the summer of 1920, Mary Irwin journeyed northward to take part in Mother Crawford’s camp meeting, held in Rose City Park in northeast Portland. By the time the meeting ended seven weeks later, she had decided to make Portland her permanent home. With no place to live or means of support, she turned to her coreligionists for assistance. One, a widow, Mrs. L. M. Bispham, offered to take Mary in “until she found work and established herself.” Mrs. Bispham also urged Mary to send for her two youngest sons. There was plenty of room in the house, and they would make good companions for her own son, a ten-year-old named Royal.
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In later years, Fenelon would remember his brief time at Whittier as one of happiest periods of his boyhood. Supplied with a clean suit of work clothes and three substantial meals a day, he was better
dressed and fed than at any other time in his life. Unlike his incorrigible older brother, he maintained a spotless record of behavior, did well in his vocational training classes, and was awarded first prize in a school-wide essay-writing contest. His stay there lasted less than seven months. In October 1920, by order of the juvenile court, he was discharged from Whittier and restored to his mother’s custody. Bidding farewell to Vidalin—who, having recently turned seventeen, still had four years to serve on his sentence—Fenelon reluctantly took his leave of the reformatory and, with Pember in tow, boarded a train to Portland.
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