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“Instead of just giving them a spanking, he would take whatever he could get his hands on-a brush or a hanger or whatever-and beat them with that,” Wanty said. “I had to read the book to him and read the questions to him down at the Department of Transportation to get his chauffeur’s license,” Wanty said. When Wanty married him, David wasn’t literate. He spent most of his wages gambling, and Wanty described him as “a drinker and drug addict” who may have had learning disabilities. Her husband, David, drove a semi and was gone much of the time. “When I was eight months pregnant with my fifth child, I was out there pumping gas,” she said. Wanty worked at the mini-mart, cleaned offices, roofed houses, and tended bar to support her six kids. He would miss them because he couldn’t do it.” “He had a hard time even trying to shoot a deer,” Wanty said. He liked the idea of hunting because it was outdoorsy and manly, but he didn’t like the killing part. When he caught fish or frogs in the creek, he threw them back. She described him as timid and softhearted. “Timmy loved the woods,” his mother, Becky Wanty, remembered. Taylor spent his days collecting cans for nickels, riding his bike in empty lots, and playing alone by a creek near his home, watching polliwogs wriggle in the shallow water. He and other neighborhood kids were mostly left to themselves, their parents either working or at home drinking too much and apt to whale on them if they got in the way.
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In many respects, Taylor had a typical rough-and-tumble 1980s childhood. Little Timathy Taylor lived behind the PDQ mini-mart in Roseburg, a small timber town in western Oregon surrounded by mountains. Listen to her discuss this story on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Think Out Loud. Her first book, Rambunctious Garden, examines how conservation is changing in the Anthropocene. Her stories have appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, Outside, High Country News, and Nature, where she was on staff for several years. Emma Marris is a journalist in Klamath Falls, Oregon.