The Rock

Trafford Publishing

Contents

Chapter 1 BEFORE PALMER....................................................1Chapter 2 MEETING PALMER...................................................8Chapter 3 TEXAS TWO STEP...................................................22Chapter 4 LOS ANGELES......................................................26Chapter 5 GOODBYE TO HOLLYWOOD.............................................33Chapter 6 BACK TO DALLAS...................................................38Chapter 7 BACK TO THE CON..................................................42Chapter 8 A NEW CHAPTER IN LIFE............................................73Chapter 9 MY LIFE..........................................................77Chapter 10 BREAKDOWN AND SEPARATION........................................80Chapter 11 A NEW BEGINNING.................................................91Chapter 12 THE FINAL DAYS..................................................95Chapter 13 THE REAL PALMER ROCKEY..........................................97Chapter 14 "SCARLET LOVE"—THE PLOT THICKENS..........................109SOME INTERESTING FACTS AND OBSERVATIONS FROM WIKIPEDIA.....................115

Chapter One

It was the fall of 1966, the trees were turning yellow in the Pacific Northwest. Coolness had set in and I was thankful for the change of weather. It had been very uncomfortable at my job during the hot weather. Working outside is not pleasant even on a good day, but I was young, 19 at the time.

I applied for the mail carrier job because I liked the outdoors after carrying the newspaper for my brother in the summers for 4 years and before that I helped him carry on Sundays from the time I was 8 years old. Also, my aunt worked at the Post Office in San Francisco and it was a good job for her.

I had to wait for 3 months and was accepted after passing the Civil Service test. This was my first real job with benefits. I requested to work in Seattle, as I knew I could get on quicker there than in Tacoma where I was born and raised. Also, I wanted to get away from my family restrictions as all young people do. I wanted to be independent, because I knew everything!

The Post Office I worked at was in the University of Washington area. It was really something to see how the students lived in the old houses around the campus. It was the beginning of the Hippie movement and they had no furniture, but sat in circles on the floor. I knew I didn't want that. I got caught one time in a Sorority hazing walk. The girls were talking and pointing at me in my uniform. I knew I didn't want that either. I was glad I was living at the YWCA in downtown Seattle, across the street from the swankiest hotel in the city, The Fairmont.

* * *

The YWCA was for women only and they rented out rooms, either with a roommate, or very rarely, a single room. The Young Women's Christian Association was a temporary living place for women who couldn't afford an apartment when they moved to the big city. No men were allowed past the front desk. There was a restaurant adjacent to the Y, as it was called for short. The Y had an Olympic size pool that was open to everyone, who paid for a membership each month or yearly to the YWCA or YMCA (Young Men's Christian Association). There was a separate entrance for men going to the swimming pool.

The Y had a day care, although no children were allowed in the rooms with the women. We were mainly young single women. They still have 116 rooms for women with a 24 hour front desk and secured elevator entry for all floors. Only now, they have a shared bathroom between two rooms and only one woman in each room. Each room has a small refrigerator in it.

Back then, there were communal bathrooms and most rooms were double occupancy.

We had kitchen privileges. The refrigerator had metal wire lock boxes in it. We could only put our food to be refrigerated in the cages as it would be stolen otherwise. Much stealing went on and even with a lock on the cage, if someone could grab something out of the cage, it would be gone. I saw this happen, but the girl, trying to get some bacon out, told me it was her cage; that she lost the key to the padlock. I found out later that the cage belonged to someone else.

I roomed with someone at first, but later when I got a raise, I moved to the biggest single room they had in the old building.

One man accosted me on the street trying to sell me insurance one day, because he had seen my picture in the newspaper for being the first woman carrier in the city of Seattle. I had to enter the YWCA to get rid of him.

* * *

I was young and knew I needed a car. My Dad took me to buy a blue and white Ford. I don't know what model or make, but my father worked for a Ford Motor Company, so he was loyal to Ford. The first day I drove it to work, it was towed away because I parked in a 2 hour parking zone. I walked to my brother, Robert's trailer, as he was attending the University of Washington, and he took me home. A man from work told me how to find the car, as I was young and ignorant about towing zones. I bailed the car out and then the next morning it wouldn't start. It was the battery, but I was tired of it already and didn't have the money for a battery at that time. What a headache!! The reality of upkeep had hit me. A car was expensive to park downtown and expensive to take care of.

Dad financed it until it broke down. He took it back home to Tacoma, painted it and made some money selling it. He was a "Body and Fender Man" by trade and worked painting cars on the side.

I rode the bus after that during the day and in the morning I took a cab to work as it was too dangerous on the bus in that area of town. When I wasn't working, I walked everywhere.

I walked to the markets on the Sound, where someone was making bread in the form of turtles, alligators and other animals. It was great fun to see everything there.

At the very beginning of my mail carrying days I dated a boy about my age, named Tracy. We went on a double date with his brother to a Beatles concert at the Seattle Center, where The World's Fair had been. We were so far away from the stage, that the Beatles looked like little stick men. Some people next to us let us use their binoculars several times. It was exciting! I had never been to a concert before.

We were both subs and if I was late, he would come out and help me. We got to ride the bus free if we had a Postal bag over our shoulder. Tracy took me down to the most expensive store in town, Frederick & Nelson, where his mother worked. She wrapped up the articles people bought and it was really crowded there with a Security Guard on duty. I looked at a few prices and almost fainted. I was afraid I might break something with my purse and I would not be able to pay for it, so I held my purse really close. I did meet his mother. I had started working in August, then, he was drafted in September. I didn't know if I would ever see or hear from him again. In the spring, out of the blue, I received a letter from him. I told him I was going to marry someone else.

Then a 45 year old carrier, Gene, asked if I would like to meet his son, who was close to my age. He invited me to go square dancing with his family and I would have to stay overnight because they got finished so late. His wife was very nice to me and I ate supper with them 3 or 4 times and went square dancing with them. His wife got out an old dress of hers and modified it so I could wear it. He was an unassigned carrier and was always trying to get me to go somewhere with him during work. I went one time and he tried to kiss me and I knew something was really wrong with this situation. I should have cut off contact with him and his family right then because the next time at breakfast his wife started accusing me of having an affair with him. She told me he was 45, had kids, and she would take everything they had. I didn't know what to say. I was scared to death. I was only 19 and just wanted to run. She kept on by saying that she had seen him get up really early and come in and stare at me for 15 minutes before he woke me up in the morning and he seemed to be in love with me. I turned redder and redder and started to cry.

We left and when I got to work I told him not to talk to me again. Then, Gene stalked me and showed up on my route, at the very end, and asked to drive me back to the station. I told him, "NO!" I finally noticed, the next day, that he was parked on the top of the hill, in the graveyard above the last street of my route. I went in and told my supervisor and he spoke to Gene, because that stopped. Then he showed up when I went for a walk, out of the YWCA. I told him to get lost and he kept walking and talking and I had to run back into the Y to get rid of him. I had to go to the supervisor again and then he stopped.

I was so upset over these events, I had to go to the doctor and get a tranquilizer. The tranquilizer worked.

Then I got my first CREDIT CARDS; something unheard of before this time in my family. Credit Cards were just coming in as a way to shop at your favorite store. My parents signed for a credit card for me at JC Penney's and I was very inept at figuring the bills from the Credit Card, because we received the bill with the holes in the cards, and no one had calculators then. We had to add each purchase separately, but I always had enough money to pay the bill.

Bank statements were also Greek to me and I had no one to help me figure it out. At that time, it cost 10 cents to write a check, so you had to add that cost in every time you wrote one. I dealt in cash most of the time because of bank fees for checks and accounts. But I was able to cash my check at the bank for nothing.

All these experiences in learning about living on your own helped me with Palm as he didn't know much about banking, either. He dealt in cash only, but credit cards were to play an important part in Palmer's life in the future.

Chapter Two

I first met Palmer at the Seattle Public Library. He was confident and dashing. Over the years, many people came in contact with him but none came to know him like I did. How did I get selected to be his confidant you may ask? I was naïve and young, with no friends or relatives in town to object to him. I was on my own.

The library was very close to the YWCA and I loved visiting it. It had more books than any library I had been in.

I was looking up phone numbers in the telephone book section one day, but Palmer must have been looking for a sucker. He was hanging around and struck up a conversation with me. He was middle aged, but looked in his 30's and was very handsome. As I said before, the hippie movement was just beginning. The neighborhood was full of people turning away from the way their parents had dressed and acted. My father wasn't a hippie. He was of the working class and rarely wore a suit. But here was Palmer wearing a suit and tie! That impressed me. His short hair slicked back and curly on top, bowled me over. His hands were not callused, so I thought he was a businessman. I should have known better, since it was during work hours and only the unemployed wandered around at that time. Being young has its disadvantages, mainly no worldly experience about certain types of men and their wiles.

We went to an area where there were chairs and he asked what kind of job I had. I was reluctant to tell him, but proud that I had my picture on the front page of the Seattle Post Intelligencer, just a few weeks before. I was the first woman mail carrier in Seattle. I thought he might know who I was.

I told him to guess my occupation. He asked to look at my hands and guessed the usual—secretary, office worker. Finally, I told him a mail carrier. He acted very mysterious about what he did for a living and even his name was different. I had never heard the name of Rockey before. I liked the sound of it and became fascinated with him. I was young and without friends in the area, to help me get a grip on the situation properly. I know now that anyone who is secretive and old, must have something to hide.

He finally asked me for a date to a nice restaurant. I was under the drinking age, but got by with it because he was older and I looked older than my age. I usually drank Irish coffee. We went out several times, but he would never say where he lived, what he did for a living, or his age.

He talked, all the time, about Jesus. He had been a Catholic and had started reading the Bible. He came around to being saved. For those, who don't know what this means, here is an explanation. Being saved means that you have had a personal conviction that you are a sinner and Jesus died to make you sinless in his Father's eyes. Your sins are forgiven forever and now you are to change your life to obey the 10 commandments. This is summed up in the quote from scripture: "If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." (Romans 10:9) A personal relationship with Jesus is the only way you can even try to do that. When you fall out of the relationship, you are backslidden; which happened to Palmer.

His arguments and quoting the Bible impressed me. Then he told me he was a PhD and I was hooked. I couldn't believe he was interested in me and had been a University Professor.

That is when I knew I loved him!

He bought me my first bible for Christmas (1966). I began reading the Bible so I would understand what he was talking about. We went to a different Protestant Church every Sunday. He was so paranoid that he picked me up a block away. I would walk through the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel, which was across the street from the Y, and walk to the door on the other side of the hotel. I should have known that something was wrong with this picture. It added to his allure.

Shortly after our first date, I made some chocolate chip cookies; tons of them. I wanted to show him I could cook. I was trying to impress him. We both got tired of eating them, but he called me "Cookie" after that. The next kind of cookie I tried was sugar cookies. He must not have liked them, because he gave them back to me and told me to ask if the Nursery in the Y could use them. They also told me not to make any more. I got the message.

I like soft cookies and the kids must have made a mess with them. But Cookie stuck and several times he called me that, when he could not remember my real name. That was when he introduced me to someone at a church.

* * *

Palmer finally asked me to support him as a missionary. He was going to make a "life of Christ" that would sweep the world and he would be the Producer, Director, Writer and Star of it. We would be rich and famous.

I met Palm in October and by March he asked me to support him. I ended up paying his rent and giving him spending money for food, gas for his car, and going out after church on Sunday. I did this so he would not have to work as a busboy at a local restaurant at night. He was working there, because he didn't have to use his SS number for that job. He didn't want his backers to know he would stoop that low. (The real truth was, that his Aunt, who he owed money to, for a trip to London, was looking for him.)

When Palm was going to get the first payment from me to support him, we met down the street from the Y, in his old "54 Chevrolet Belaire. Like a stupid fool, I told him how much money I had in the bank and he was going to tell me how much he needed that day. Well, I had just gotten my Income Tax back, in the meantime, and I had more in the bank than I had previously told him. Palm got mad that I hadn't told him the right amount and I had to explain. I forget how much I gave him every 2 weeks, but we had $20 to spend each weekend. I was earning $2.64 an hour at that time. One time we spent $20 on junk food. When he realized that, he said we would have to cut back on snacks. He was the one who bought the stuff, not me.

One night Palm took me out so we could make-out. We parked not far from the Y, on the side of the street, between two parked cars and on a hill (all of downtown Seattle, is on hills). We were kissing for a short time, when some men ran out of a car parked in the parking lot right across the sidewalk from us. They showed us their police badges and told him to get out of the car. One man stayed and questioned me. He took my license back to their car. Palm was with the other policeman and his license was being checked out. I was told that they were plain clothes officers staked out in this district because there had been several rapes in that area. Palm ran back to me and was afraid I had seen his birth date. He was upset that I might know his age. Another sign I ignored. We were let go and told to go somewhere else to neck.

Palm decided to show me where he lived, after that. Palm lived in a run-down hotel at the edge of downtown with many retired people. The hotel was not far from the YWCAand the library. I remember getting in an elevator in his hotel and he looked around for something up above. He said, "In the end they will have cameras in the elevators." That was 45 years ago. I wonder when they put surveillance cameras in elevators? (I think it might have been in the 1980's because that is when the modern elevators were installed in most buildings. In large cities, they have had to put them in first, because of violence.) It was Orwellian at the time, but I didn't catch onto his paranoia.

The room didn't have a bathroom but it did have a sink. The bathroom was communal and down the hall. The bath tubs were in the basement in little cubicles. We went through there several times, and there was always someone taking a bath. It seemed quite dangerous to me. There were no locks anywhere on the cubicles. I couldn't figure out why he wanted to go out the back door into an alley, but soon found out why he skulked around.

His uncle was looking for him so he would have to pay his wife back for the money he borrowed from her.

Shortly thereafter, there was a fire on his floor. He packed his belongings into his suitcase and ran out into the hallway. The smoke was thick and he could hardly see where he was going. He knocked on doors as he headed for the stairs. It was put out and he moved back into a blackened room. Another time he was asleep at night when someone put a key in the lock and a woman opened the door. She was told the room was empty, apologized and left. What a dumpy life. He was a real itinerant. He had an old '54 Chevy and that large suitcase.

One night he opened up to me about his education and serving in the military, as all young men at that time had to serve.

He said, on one date, "I was drafted after WW II and was in the occupation of Germany. While I was there, I learned German from the widow of a German Officer." He told me.

Palm said, "VD was rampant then and they had to show all of the army men what it looked like, and told them to be careful." He emphasized that he never screwed around with anybody and everyone knew it.

The military gave every soldier a carton of cigarettes every week and he made extra money selling his. He visited several countries during that time, including Italy, especially Naples, the birthplace of his father. He used the money from selling cigarettes to tour Europe.

Palmer never mentioned his early education, but talked extensively about St Louis University.

Palm said another time, "When I was going to St Louis University, I worked as a security guard at a business office at night. I could study, then. No place had air conditioning so the ceiling fans were all they had. When I got there, I had to turn off all the extra fans on my rounds of the offices. I watched to see that no one came in illegally."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Rockby Cookie Ann Rockey Copyright © 2012 by Cookie Ann Rockey. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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