What Do You Say To A Woman Who Steals From Her Own Children?
"A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband: but she that maketh ashamed is as rottenness in his bones." Proverbs 12:4
Introduction
What do you say to a woman who steals from her own children?
I have been pondering this question and all of the possible answers to it, sixteen hours a day, for most of a decade now.
Robbing the future seems so wrong on so many levels; and yet, when marshalling the arguments with which to convince someone to not steal from the future, one encounters profound philosophical issues that would challenge Sir Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell to articulate. The future doesn't exist. How can you have a crime without a victim?
Imagine challenging such a person, only to be told, "These are my children. I created them. I paid for everything they have. I own everything they produce. Why should I not take it?" What do you say in response to such a claim?
Perhaps a better question would be: Why would a woman steal from her own children?
Phrased that way, obviously, the answer is: because those children have something that their mother wants.
Now we are getting somewhere. No philosophy is required. The motive is simple and ancient: greed. And an embarrassing lack of self-discipline.
It's possible that dementia played a role, as well - when my mother was doing these things, she already had a conservator.
But where was the conservator? It turns out the conservator was also tainted by greed and a lack of self-discipline.
But where were the lawyers? They were as thick as fleas when the money was being distributed. Where are they now?
The lawyers aren't answering questions, but it seems possible that, yet again, greed - and an embarassing lack of self-discipline - was again at fault - and this time, there is no dementia to hide behind.
Although it embarrasses me to say this, my mother, Eleanora Penny Runyon-Salanave, was addicted: to money, and, through money, to power, and control. Eleanora Penny Runyon-Salanave was a greedy and power-hungry bitch who had been raised as a single child and did not know how to share; not even with her own children.
If her caretakers and lawyers had trouble distinguishing her post-dementia greediness from her pre-dementia greediness, I infer ... it was because they accepted her greed, and shared it, and, as a consequence, were blind to the fact that it grew excessive.
My mother's addiction to money led my mother to steal her own mother's (my grandmother's) will ... steal her own mother's (my grandmother's) deed to her own house ... rob her own son - that would be me - of his inheritance, and a place to live ... and, only six weeks after cleaning out her mother's (my grandmother's) safe, behind her mother's (my grandmother's) back, my mother caused her own mother's (my grandmother's) untimely and unnatural death, when her mother (that is to say, my grandmother) discovered the empty safe, and dropped dead, from shock.
It is the purpose of this website to analyze my mother's conduct for the warning signs of her pathological behaviors that were surely there, and to share those warning signs with others.
Observing the sort of companions that my mother was keeping in her last years, it is entirely possible that this pathological behavior was some sort of requirement for acceptance into some sort of club of elderly criminals - not unlike being required to run over a pedestrian that your gang leader points out, at random, as part of a gang initiation.
My mother desperately wanted to be respected and accepted by the upper crust of society. What if the upper crust were all criminals? What would my mother be willing to do to achieve their respect? We will explore this possibility - white collar criminal gang activity - as well.
Other people create websites about their hobbies or in memoriam to their long-lost beloved. It falls to me to create a website about the most perfectly awful woman I have ever had the displeasure of knowing intimately. I honestly think that with my mother's passing, the world has become a slightly better place, in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back sort of way. So it goes.
0. Outline
An approximate outline of this analysis would go something like this:
- Penny's parents
- Penny's childhood and adolescence
- Penny's boyfriends
- Penny's abortions
- Penny's first marriage
- Penny's children
- Penny's second marriage
- Penny's Unitarianism
- Penny's third marriage
- Penny's business ventures
- Penny's friends
- Penny's death
- Penny's estate
1. Penny's parents
As a child, I always thought that my grandfather was my mother's father. And my mother allowed this delusion to persist.
As I grew older I learned that at one time my grandmother had been married to a man named Farkas, who had been my mother's stepfather, and I thought, OK, Grandpa was her father, but he and Grandma had a falling out, she married this Farkas guy for a while, then divorced him and married the father of her child, and all ended well. My mother allowed this delusion to persist as well.
And then one day after my grandmother had died and I was in Connecticut, cleaning my grandmother's house, I found a piece of art created by my grandfather, in high school, in Wisconsin, a thousand miles away from New York City and maybe 18 months before my mother was conceived - and i realized that my grandfather was not my mother's father.
So who was my mother's father? Wondering this, I realized that I had never seen my mother's birth certificate. My mother had used the nearly three thousand miles separating the East and West coasts of North America as an excuse to insulate my brothers and I from her parents, our grandparents, and, I gradually realized, in so doing, she had sought to keep us uninformed and disconnected from our own family members and our own history.
My mother had personal files but this all ended up in the custody of my older brother, Thomas Childers, when he became our mother's conservator. There has been no turnover of the contents of the files that our mother had for each of us. Lacking evidence to the contrary, it would seem that my older brother either maliciously destroyed these materials to keep them out of our, his younger brothers' hands ... or my older brother is retaining these records for some reason he cannot justify - emotional blackmail is likely.
As custodian of these materials, Thomas Childers would be the person who best knows where Eleanora Penny Runyon-Salanave's birth certificate is. Locating that missing document would answer a lot of questions.
I'm not much into DNA testing and ancestry research, but somewhere there may be a man or a woman who shares perhaps 25% of my genetic inheritance but who is entirely unknown to me. If and when such a person is identified, then I will know with a high probability who my mother's father was.
2. Penny's childhood and adolescence
To the best of my knowledge - lacking our mother's missing birth certificate - Eleanora's name, at birth, was probably Eleanora Simon - because my great-grandmother's surname was Simon - pronounced, in the Hungarian style, "Shimon" - so that it was not until I saw my greatgrandmother's gravestone, in Bridgeport, that I first realized that what I had always heard as 'Shimon', was actually spelled 'Simon'.
When Eleanora was a child, during World war II, children were put to work begging for pennies, which contained copper and were melted down and turned into bullets. My mother was so good at begging people for spare change that her nickname became "Penny", and, when she turned 18, she petitioned the court to have her middle name legally be made Penny.
However, in the interval, I think that young Eleanora Simon had become Eleanora Farkas, then Eleanora Simon again, then Eleanora Horvath - my grandfather's name. And she was probably calling herself Eleanora Horvath when she left home to go to college, in Arizona - that would have been around 1953 or 1954.
However, before my mother left for college, evidence indicates that she had at least one and maybe two abortions. My mother, herself, one said that she had had three abortions in her life, and I know that one of the abortions was in West Germany - when she was a newlywed, with my father, when he was in the US Army, during the Occupation, after World War II. But that leaves two abortions unaccounted for.
Some people - women - would say that it is none of my business. However, if I am not permitted to inquire into the basis for the premeditated murder of not one, not two, but THREE older brothers, then, really, who is allowed to ask questions? So, I suggest you go put a sock in it.
As long as we are talking about surnames ... what about this 'Salanave-Runyon' nonsense? Does this have any legitimacy? I don't think so. My mother's stringing the surnames of her last two husbands together, in a desperate attempt to retain the name recognition and prestige associated with the former name, while trying to position herself to harvest the prestige attached to the latter name, simultaneously, was just plain sad. Learn from my mother's mistake. Don't do it. It just confuses people. The relevant legal records are all filed under either 'Salanave' or 'Runyon'.
But if such a strategy had any validity and people made a habit of listing every name they had ever used - together, in chronological order - I think my mother's full name would be something like 'Eleanora Penny Simon-Farkas-Horvath-Childers-Salanave-Runyon'.
3. Penny's boyfriends
My mother never breathed a single syllable about anyone before my father, Dallas Childers.
4. Penny's abortions
Before my mother left for college, evidence indicates that she had at least one and maybe two abortions. My mother, herself, once said that she had had three abortions in her life, and I know that one of the abortions was in West Germany - when she was a newlywed, with my father, when he was in the US Army, during the Occupation, after World War II. But that leaves two abortions unaccounted for.
Some people - women - would say that it is none of my business. However, if I am not permitted to inquire into the basis for the premeditated murder of not one, not two, but THREE older brothers, then, really, who is allowed to ask questions? So, I suggest you go put a sock in it.
As I said, above, my mother never breathed a single syllable about anyone before my father, Dallas Childers.
But obviously someone fathered those two unaccounted-for abortions during my mother's adolescence.
My guess is that Penny probably allowed herself to get knocked up by some nice boy, whose mother, or grandmother, totally rejected her as not being good enough, leaving my mother with a huge inferiority complex that she compensated for by making everyone else feel like shit. My guess is my mother allowed herself to get pregnant on purpose with the intention of shoehorning herself into a life of leisure, but that her would-be future in-laws saw right through her.
It's entirely possible that the young man was brought to heel by his mother's threat to disinherit him ... leaving Penny with a burning desire to join this new sisterhood she had discovered: to accumulate a great fortune, throw her weight around, and threaten people with disinheritance, too. More on that, below.
These are pretty harsh things to say about one's own mother. It's tempting to say that I am an ungrateful child. But all of my differences with my mother relate to how she treated my stepfather, and my grandparents - her own parents. This is discussed, below.
My mother's total refusal to address these topics while she was alive, really, left those of us with an interest in the facts with no alternative but to fill in the gaps with educated guesses.
This theory also explains why my mother worked so hard to avoid having us visit our grandparents every summer; my mother did not want her mother telling us any stories about her as a girl or a young woman.
If there is a moral to this, it is to tell your children the truth so that they don't end up following false trails in a desperate attempt to figure out What Really Happened.
5. Penny's first marriage
Penny went off to college in Arizona, and met her future husband Dallas at the University of Arizona. They fell in love. They graduated. They got married. At least, that's the story.
In reality, Penny had applied to the University of Arizona because she wanted to get as far away from Bridgeport as possible. Penny had supposedly chosen Arizona because she had psoriasis, and needed to get more sun. At least, that's the narrative we were given, as children.
In reality my analysis is that Penny's psoriasis was stress-related and that she moved 3000 miles away from her home in Bridgeport to escape the stress - which was probably related to the events and circumstances that led to her first abortion, and, perhaps, her second abortion, before she even left Bridgeport to go to college.
(It seems possible that my mother might have cultivated something of a reputation as 'easy', with all the difficulties that ensue.)
After graduation, Dallas joined the US Army and went off to Germany. Penny came along.
After Dallas and Penny returned from Germany, Dallas fathered Thomas Childers, my older brother. Penny and Dallas then lived in Bridgeport, with my grandparents; Thomas was born in Bridgeport.
Something happened - some territorial thing between my grandfather and my father - and Penny and Dallas left Bridgeport ... dallied in Texas, where Dallas was from ... and ended up back in Arizona.
It was probably in Texas that my mother met my paternal grandfather, Dallas, Senior, who was a mechanical engineer and was not rumored to have a lot of tolerance for nonsense.
My guess is that he sized up his son's new wife up as a New York city girl with not a lot of spine, said as much, and earned Penny's undying enmity for being blunt and honest. So it goes.
My sense is that I reminded my mother of Dallas, Senior ... they say, I take after him. It probably didn't make her too comfortable.
Dallas acquired employment with the United States Geological Survey and was assigned to monitor river flows somewhere in northern Arizona - Lee's Ferry, I think. I don't think they had electricity. Penny was not enthusiastic. I think Dallas discovered, then, that Penny, my mother, was a hard-core city girl.
Dallas and Penny then moved back to Tucson, where I was born.
At some point Dallas - who had subscribed to Playboy magazine, which was brand new, and daring, and mailed in a plain brown wrapper - got mixed up with a minx, at work. Based on information and belief, Penny - who was a very vindictive woman - retaliated against my father by fucking one of his friends, coworkers, or neighbors - I'm not sure which - and things blew up. My younger brother's eye color and blood type were different from mine and my older brother's. Oops.
In fairness to my dad, it might have been the other way around - Penny was fucking around while Dallas was at work, and so Dallas set out to get some satisfaction of his own. Regardless, Dallas ended up moving in with his minx from work - her name was Toni - and chaos ensued, at work.
Penny's parents drove all the way out from the East Coast, with what I think may have been a brand new Rambler automobile - built like a tank - so that Penny was not marooned, without a car, in Tucson. It was the first time I had ever met my grandparents! That might have been one of the best times in my life. I'd never felt like someone cared that much about my wellbeing before - fact.
As soon as our grandparents had left town, though, Penny strapped us all into our seats, drove over to Toni's place of residence, and made a big scene out front, making sure all the neighbors knew that Dallas had abandoned his children - although, looking at it from an adult's perspective, it might be more accurate to say that he had been driven away by my mother's vindictive behavior and no longer found her attractive.
It was 1966, and Penny was a single mother, with three boys.
The next few years, we were all latch-key children; the first of what would soon become a trickle, then a stream, then a flood, then, a deluge, of children, at home, after school, without supervision.
It was Thomas' job to come and pick us up from the kindergarten, one block away from our house - but I can tell you, he did not like this duty. Conflict ensued - and when he asked, our mother gave Thomas permission to physically discipline us, by punching us on the shoulder, when we did not do what he told us to.
Essentially, Penny deputized her oldest son, Thomas, to fill in for her missing husband.
In retrospect, there are some decidely irregular aspects to the relationship between my mother and my older brother. If we were to look for the roots of this irregularity, they would be here - and even earlier, in the relationship between a woman, and her firstborn.
Which would explain why Thomas, and Penny's next husband, Leon, would always be in conflict, every day, until the day Leon died.
Dallas ended up going to Afghanistan, ostensibly as part of a loan program to the Afghan government, where our government loaned their government hydrological engineers to help the Afghanis locate, design, and build flood control systems. From what we know, now, this was probably a dual purpose mission, where participants were also collecting information on mineral deposits for the United States government, unbeknownst to the Afghan government - and so my father's military experience may have been a factor in his being offered the opportunity to get out of town for a few years. We didn't see our father for another decade.
Penny joined a group called Parents Without Partners, but, as I recall it, it was a group of people who all had PTSD and were barely functioning, themselves. The group had no leadership and it had no spirit, either.
It was probably someone associated with Parents Without Partners who clued Penny in to the Tucson Unitarian-Universalist Church; or maybe it was the other way around, and it was someone in the UU organization who pointed Penny to Parents Without Partners.
It was through matchmakers at the Tucson Unitarian-Universalist Church, that Penny met her next husband - Leon Salanave.
But before we go there, first, we need to talk about Penny's offspring.
6. Penny's children
Penny had a three abortions - she said they were all boys. So we will call these Son #1, Son #2, and Son #3.
In 1958 Penny bore Thomas Dallas Childers, my older brother, and #4 - although Tom, naturally, thinks of himself as #1.
Thomas always had his own room except for a very short period when he had to share a room with me, when he was very young.
Thomas was raised, carefully insulated from I and my younger brother, and so I am going to say that he was raised as an only child, even though he had two younger brothers ... and his behavior reflects this.
In 1962 Penny launched moi, Richard Alexander Childers, the so-called "middle child" - but really, I am #5. I am three and a half years younger than Thomas. This did not stop me from competing with Thomas - sometimes, successfully. When I was only three or four years old, Tom was diagnosed with sibling rivalry. So I must have been quite a rival.
In 1963 Penny delivered John Wesley Childers, #6, the baby of the family - my younger brother. We were less than two years apart.
My sense is that if there had not been witnesses, Penny would have tried to abort John Wesley - who in my opinion may have been the smartest of us all, as he acquired an advanced amateur radio license (KK6IX) at a relatively young age, but never received the recognition he so desperately craved, from his mother, and his oldest brother (WN6ARL), who had also been a ham radio operator.
I say "we were less than two years apart", because my younger brother, John, died, under mysterious circumstances, in August, 2020. Fentanyl is suspected - as is murder. My older brother's role in these events has yet to be determined. More on that, below.
7. Penny's second marriage
Poor Leon! He had the misfortune to be Eleanora Penny Simon-Farkas-Horvath-Childers' second husband.
Penny's second husband, Leon Salanave, was born and grew up in San Francisco. Leon was a native Californian and a native San Franciscan - a rare bird, in this state and this city of transients and social climbers.
Leon once showed me the house he had lived in when he was just a wee lad; it was in the Duboce Triangle, He told me that when he was a child he thought the outcropping of rocks at the top of what is now called Corona Heights Park, was occupied by trolls.
Back then - probably around 1920 - Castro Street must have represented the western boundary of San Francisco - everything beyond that was sand dunes, wind-stunted trees, ice plants and occasional upwellings of water.
Later, Leon's father, Edward Salanave, bought a house on 43rd Avenue, near Geary Street - at the very end of the Geary streetcar line - and it was from the house of 43rd Avenue, that Leon went to Presidio Junior High School, a few blocks away; Galileo High School, across the street from the Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory; then, to University of California, at Berkeley, where he acquired a master's degree in astronomy.
As a newly minted research astronomer, Leon was just in time to teach naval officers, celestial navigation. After the war, Leon worked for the California Academy of Sciences, in Golden Gate Park - he was one of the people who built the Morrison Planetarium projector, which, in the days before computers, was no trivial task.
Somewhere in there, Leon had the bad luck to meet a disloyal woman.
People who are born or who grow up in San Francisco, unless their parents are from another country, probably don't realize that San Francisco is a gateway city for people coming from all over the world. But the fact is, most of the people in San Francisco are just passing through.
This seriously impacts native San Franciscans' ability to form meaningful relationships. Almost everyone who might be a prospective mate has roots a thousand miles away or more. The moment one's relationship hits a rocky spot, one's partner packs up and retreats to another state, another time zone, or even another continent. This makes it very difficult to grow up normally and have a normal family and may go a long way towards explaining the turbulence surrounding California's family courts, to which the rest of the nation looks to, for guidance.
So, anyway, this woman married Leon, and had two children with Leon, but then, ran away with her dentist - who took her, and Leon's children, Camille, and Jonathan, back to Idaho, with him, leaving Leon crushed, and with what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder.
Leon's PTSD manifested in an inability to focus. He was, like many of us, these days, distracted, by intrusive thoughts and memories - which he remedied, by making a list of things to do, each morning, to help him stay focused - a very useful habit we could all stand to copy.
Leon moved away from San Francisco and the house he had bought for his young family, on Seventeenth Avenue, in easy walking distance to the California Academy of Sciences, and relocated to Tucson - where he taught astronomy classes for the University of Arizona and did research on lightning for the Department of Atmospheric Physics and tried not to think too much. Leon spent his Saturdays at the lightning laboratory, out in the desert, drinking Rainier Ale and eating pretzels and distracting himself with research.
There, in Tucson, Leon had the bad luck to be introduced to my mother, Penny.
Perhaps it was not all misfortunate. Leon desperately missed his own children. My younger brother, John Wesley, filled a void in Leon's life, that his divorce and the loss of his children had left. John and I, as well as Thomas, desperately needed a father figure in our lives.
Leon taught us boys stuff that Penny hadn't a clue even existed. Such as, how to fix a flat bicycle tire. How to start a fire. How to car-camp. How to build a tent, using just a tarp, or two, and a single rope. How to cook over a fire. How to wash pans with sand instead of soap. How to make hot chocolate from powdered milk. How to roll up your sleeping bag, tight.
How to use a red filter over your flashlight to preserve your night vision. How to operate binoculars, and telescopes. Leon built us a treehouse. Leon introduced I and my brothers to the electromagnetic spectrum. Leon introduced us to giant telescopes, and the people who built and operated them. Leon taught us the physics of lightning.
Leon introduced me to scientific discourse - I was introduced to Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead after finding their books in his library. Leon was a good influence, and I miss him. His parents must have been exceptional people.
In 1970, Leon's father, in San Francisco, passed away, and Leon was faced with the question of what to do with the house he had grown up in.
Penny wanted very much to live in San Francisco. Penny wanted to work in the Financial District. Penny read the Wall Street Journal and aspired to be involved in high finance. Penny got her wish.
In February, 1972, we left Tucson, and moved to San Francisco.
Which is unfortunate, because Tucson, and Kitt Peak Observatory, are the birthplace of the FORTH programming language ... and if we had remained, I have no doubt that I and my brothers would have all ended up deeply involved in the local computing, solar power and electronics industries.
San Francisco did not offer us kids much in the way of added value. San Francisco is cold. The streets are hilly and unfriendly to bicycles. The houses are packed together.
Dangerous children were being bussed to local schools, just then, and local children were being bussed to dangerous schools. We arrived right in the middle of all that.
The San Francisco Unified School District was substandard, covering material I had learned the year before at my old school - I was quickly skipped into the next grade - a maneuver that my mother boasted about but in reality was not in my best interests and which ultimately destabilized my education.
In retrospect, the move to San Francisco was all about Penny's professional development. Basically, we all had our lives torn apart to satisfy the whim of a rootless cosmopolitan who missed living in New York City.
As luck would have it, there was a house for sale, on Seventeenth Avenue, in the Sunset District, only a few blocks away from the house Leon had bought after his first marriage. And so we ended up moving into 2047 17th Avenue, San Francisco.
(More to come ...)