In honor of Father's Day, the page this time is dedicated to my father. BeeWee's son, Maxwell, was born February 29, 1932. As is to be expected, Max never had much contact with BeeWee. Hell, BeeWee wasn't even 12 when Max was born. Max was raised by his mother Leona.

Even as a young child, Max ran with a wild crowd. Popular with the kids, Max was always considered the clever one, the crafty one. His nickname was "Shady", because he always had some kind of deal in the making. Pictured here at the age of nine, Max had already been arrested twice for shop lifting soccer balls.

Max grew up hard. Life in the slums of Brookpark is no picnic. Like many young men in the area, he ended up involved in gangs. As a member of the "Dreaded Rockets", teen Max was involved in a number of fights and suspected of selling defective prophylactics to minors. "Shades" could usually be found with his best friend, Maynard, often discussing politics with the local police.

Thanks to the intervention of the his mother Leona's good friend, Father Devlin, Max began to change his ways. Abandoning petty crime for the paint brush, Max showed an amazing talent for portraiture. He was also quite pleased to discover he could make more money selling paintings than he could trying to fence stolen vegetables.

Two of his best known early works were of the lovely Yvette Hewlett, a local girl Max meet while still running with the "Dreaded Rockets". They're first meeting, in fact, was when he was trying to steal Yvette's father's 1946 Nash Rambler.

"The Picture of an Angel" and "Another Picture of an Angel" were painted in the spring of 1952. At the age of 20, Max cut a dashing figure. His manly good looks and sparkling wit soon captivated his favorite model.

The couple moved in together almost immediately.

I was born on December 23^rd, 1952.

Although, Max was doing fairly well with his painting, and Yvette had a promising career in the dental hygiene field, we lived for many years in the back of a semi-tracker truck.

This is one of the last pictures of my parents as a couple, taken in front of the old "house". I would have been about three years old at that time. It was shortly after this that Yvette ran away with a woman named Norma, never to be seen again.

Max continued to have success painting portraits, as well as success with some of his models. My favorite of his paintings was done in the summer of 1968. Honey lived with us for nearly five months as Max worked on this portrait. She was 19 and came from San Francisco. I'll always remember Honey.

Some time during the winter of 1974, while I was living in England, Max became obsessed with the notion of time. He'd write long letters to me detailing his theories on the nature of time. He became convinced that time travel was not only theoretically possible, but that he could create a time machine himself.

My father disappeared in the summer of 1975.

Here's to you, "Shades", whenever you are.

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