075. John Sherman

I was born in the summer of 1942 in Camden, New Jersey to a father and mother about whom I know little other than what I have been told by others. When I was three or four, my mother and father split up and I was taken to be raised by my grandmother, a Holy Ghost Pentecostal Christian, and grandfather. When I was about ten or so, my grandfather died and my mother came back to town for his funeral. Soon thereafter, she was remarried to a sweet man, a tool and die maker, who gave me much and provided me with the basis for a philosophical outlook on life. They took me back from my grandmother, and, within a year or so, we — my mother and step-father — moved to Southern California. In 1958, when I was sixteen and in tenth grade, I stole my parents' checkbook, booked a flight to New York with a bad check, and moved into the Plaza Hotel, where I assembled a wardrobe and other artifacts, went to a play on Broadway (J.B.), drank, ate high and finally bought a $2,500 Patek Phillipe watch in the hotel jewelry store — all paid for with bad checks from my parents checkbook (times were easier then for a child con man). The watch proved a little too much; hotel security entered the fray, made some phone calls to California, and came to get me. In the end, they called my grandmother in New Jersey who wired enough money to bail me out and get me a train ticket to her. I lived with my grandmother for a while, got involved with a married woman, was found out by her ex-Marine husband, and escaped into the Army, where I soldiered poorly for three years or so in Germany. Upon my discharge from the Army, I returned to New Jersey and my grandmother and was hired on as an apprentice machinist at a shipyard in Camden, New Jersey, where my grandfather had worked. I learned a good trade to fall back on and embarked on a pretty good run of good jobs and bad and stupid adventures. Soon after finishing my apprenticeship, I worked as an ambulance chaser for a couple of lawyers for a while, then as a night shift supervisor at a Thompson Ramo Wooldridge Inc. (TRW) machine shop. Before long, a woman who worked for me at TRW left her husband and we took off for Southern California, where I settled into a career of poker, credit card scams, and fraudulent check operations. She didn't stay for long. When the police moved in to break up the ring of fences and check runners that I used to dispose of stolen merchandise and cash bad checks, I escaped by the skin of my teeth and ran away to Oregon with another woman who herself was on the run from her husband with her three kids in tow. I took a job there as a photocopy salesman and was soon arrested when the car I was driving was checked by the Oregon police and identified as having been bought in California with a bad check. I was charged with the federal crime of Interstate Transportation of a Stolen Vehicle and transported to Portland, Oregon for trial at the federal district court there. I pled guilty expecting probation but was sentenced instead to three years in the federal penitentiary at McNeil Island, by a judge named Solomon. I made friends there at McNeil, and together we agitated, read Marx and Engels and Lenin and Mao, came to see ourselves as political instead of criminal, and finally managed to instigate a thirteen-day non-violent work strike, at the conclusion of which I was put in the hole and told that I would stay there until my release — a promise kept. After eighteen months in the hole, I was released from McNeil, and reunited with the woman with whom I had fled California, went to work for Boeing as a journeyman machinist in the R&D department, and joined the Revolutionary Communist Party. After several years, I left the RCP over an ideological dispute, and before long got involved with a ragtag bunch of anarcho-commies, led by my old comrade from McNeil, who called themselves with considerable grandiosity The George Jackson Brigade. Before long,